Kelvin

They should. They still fail. We had it in the previous house. Was a pia to change it.

I couldn’t get VMZinc Anthra due to the minimum weight order. My final price for supply and install of Greencoat PLX was £146/m2 including Lindab rainwater goods. VMZinc was only marginally dearer. Catnic was stupidly expensive for what it is.

We have two vaulted ceilings. One above the living room which is open plan to the kitchen dining area which normal ceiling heights. The other is in a room upstairs where we are leaving the roof open to the ridge beam so not quite double height. The light bulb changing is definitely something to think about. We are currently determining the fall heights for our cascade effect lights in the living area and trying to take this into account. I happen to have a tower anyway but that’s a whole pia to build to change a lightbulb

That’s not what my BC told me. Scottish regs.

My local BCO is very pragmatic about this. He did advise me about it before we put the rooflights in to make sure I was aware of it. Either BC stick to the limits or they allow some leeway. The problem is where is the +- cutoff.

Siemens, Bosch, Neff and Gaggenau are all part of BSH (Bosch and Siemens house appliances) Miele has a single brand I think. Zanussi is part of the Swedish brand Electrolux which also owns AEG. Our ovens are AEG, the hob is Neff and everything else Siemens. Modern appliances tend to be reliable no matter the brand.

This comes up time and again and can be a bit of a disaster as moving rooflights after they are installed isn’t easy. It’s a bit like the other thread with the non-compliant fire door problem in an open plan space. The regs are very clear and this ought to have been picked up by someone at the design stage and certainly at the build stage but it often gets missed. Your solution to this needs to be the least intrusive and least costly fix to get you through sign off so figure out what that is and do it. This might come back to haunt you later when you come to sell of course. In all likelihood it won’t but an attentive structural survey person could check this (as it’s very commonly wrong) and raise it so keep that in mind with whatever solution you employ.

I agree but going legal on a matter of principle can get very expensive very quickly. If you don’t care about the cost then fair enough. Some fights are worthing fighting. Some aren’t.

As others have said best to focus on getting it fixed and compliant first and worry about liability after. You have 6 years I believe to sue a professional for negligence. I have a similar situation with our build. The architect was the principal designer and the kit erector the principal contractor so it’s a bit more clear cut for us who was responsible for what. In my case the house hasn’t been built to either the planned drawings or the structural engineering drawings. A significant amount of re-work to make good has had to be completed. We are now compliant but it has cost us both financially and time with knock on impact to follow on work (i had to cancel every follow on trade and re-book) It’s also caused us serviceability issues that we have had to accept. Add in the stress etc and it’s been a challenging time. My focus has been to solve all the problems to get us back on track which is where we are now. It’s cost us about £10k extra, 2 month delay, and three serviceability problems. Recovering our costs and suing them hasn’t been my priority. I’ll decide what to do about that in a few months once we near completion.

If you’re placing it in proper ducting (like the Naylor electrical ducting) then you can get away with using internal ethernet cable. In every other case I’d use exterior grade cable especially if it’s exposed at any point. I’d probably still use exterior grade even if it’s ducted though.

Good effort. Well done.

Now here’s a thing. Where is it? The reason I ask is about 5 years ago we looked at a very similar looking steading. The arches look very similar.

Great effort. Looks terrific and gave an old building a new lease of life

Yes is my view in the long run. Octopus are going to some length to try and get the install cost down to a more reasonable realistic amount. The problem is that they are just one company with a limited install capacity.

It’s a bit harder to achieve with rooflights especially if they need to be fitted to a kerb. We originally fitted our rooflights on a large kerb based on erroneous information. It made the windows look daft (stuck onto the roof rather than part of the roof) plus the whole frame was outside the building. Again much to the bemusement of the builders I insisted we reinstall them with no kerb as the Velux window already has a big enough upstand for the flashings for the standing seam roof. Nevertheless they aren’t nearly as thermally efficient as the NorDan windows fitted elsewhere.

I used these guys: https://archital.co.uk/aluminium-cills/ Mine are the type 6 on that page. Worth adding that the match to my windows is just about perfect (RAL7016)

I had this whole battle in April. As designed the windows were in line with the edge of the kit for both aesthetic reasons (deep external reveal) and thermal reasons (windows inside the thermal envelope of the building). I had 5 people on-site telling me that was wrong. The guy that owned the kit building company saying that the thermal performance reason was “bullshit Kelvin the architect disnae know whit he’s talkin aboot”. Two joiners telling me they’ve been installing windaes for 30 years and if it wis their hoose they widnae day it that way. They couldn’t even agree between them the best way to do it. One wanted to install them out to the edge of the cladding which would have been a disaster given the build up. Another wanted to bring them out to the edge of the firestop because that’s how they’d always done it. So there’s clueless me with a set of construction drawings none of them had bothered looking at it and five of them bickering between themselves about how to do it and an architect I couldn’t get on the phone. In the end I insisted they fit them flush with the kit fixed with brackets. This gives us a deep external reveal. The internal reveals were already very deep. The windows are inside the building. I also had a problem with the cills. The supplied cills weren’t deep enough at 80mm. Nordan didn’t do cills deeper than about 110mm so had to get some made. The next set were 150mm deep but far too wide and I refused to have them cut to fit (powder coated) I also pointed out to them that 150mm deep still wasn’t deep enough to allow enough of a drip overhang. I supplied the measurements myself and had them made to 170mm deep which were perfect. My cills are powder coated aluminium so a bit more flexible with dimensions.

That’s definitely moving to Scotland. 😂 When you say you’ve found some land do you mean you’ve bought it (I assume not) or just that, you’ve found some land? Has the previous planning application lapsed? Just because it had planning approval before doesn’t necessarily mean it will get it again of course. What are the services like? What’s the ground like? Were there any specific conditions attached to the previous approval? Was the previous approval planning in principle or full approval? The pod holiday home thing needs careful thinking about. Some areas have too many of them and I’ve heard stories of a bit of over saturation in the pod market. Like everything else those that match the market for the area they are in or offer a different experience do well. Can’t help with the sheep but we have 12 chickens. Lovely things they are.

Welcome. Which part of Scotland?

The glazed gable end is a dear feature. We visited a house that had one. Full gable was glazed with a large overhang. It was very nice but the 3G glass cost a fortune as did the steelwork holding it all up and also seemed to be a massive cold bridge as far as I could see. What they also had, which was also very dear, was a glass corridor that joined both bits of the building together. Did all look nice though.

The wow of our house is the view across the valley to the hills beyond. What we did is widen the hallway as you walk in the front door, the inner hallway door is glazed into the kitchen which has a glazed door to the garden. Therefore when you walk in the first thing you see is an uninterrupted view straight through the full width of the house to the hills beyond. The other thing we’ve done is open up what would have the second bedroom upstairs. We’ve turned it into a sitting room. You come up the stairs and it’s open plan with a vaulted ceiling exposing the glulam ridge beam as a feature. Neither of these two things have cost us any money to do. Where we are spending a little bit of money, but not a huge amount is in some of the lighting for the open plan living area. We found a great lighting place called glow lighting in Ripon. https://www.glowlighting.co.uk Hand made blown lights and spun metal lights. They are really beautifully made. We visited them last month and were completely sold on the look.

There’s been studies done on this and there’s no risk

I followed a similar process. The trades just don’t understand enough about airtightness and how to achieve good results. This was re-inforced when not one of the trades (sparky, chippie, nor plumber) had ever seen anyone seal up the ducts at all let alone to the extent I did.

It might be the size of the photo as the forum has a size limit for pictures. Cladding needs an uninterrupted ventilation cavity behind it. Generally it would have a horizontal batten or a vertical batten and counter batten, depending on the cladding style, and the cladding fixed to that. If it’s been fixed direct to the OSB that will explain why it’s failed. Fitted properly and looked after, cladding should last for many decades.

You need dense materials rather than just more material. I’m a bit concerned about noise transfer in our build. Fortunately I’m still in a position to do something about it but I’m not convinced the noise attenuation between rooms is going to be great.