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Good morning Guys, I spent some time over on the Foundations forum yesterday, and the help I received there was brilliant....so wondered if you might be able to do the same here? We have a Grade II listed thatched cottage. It is 400 years old, and consequently, is quite....bijou, with no storage space at all (loft, cupboards, etc) when you've got as much paraphernalia as us, not to mention the professional dancer daughter, with a container load of dance costumes....anyway, I digress... We knew the house wouldn't work for us in it's current state, so we came up with the plan for a Suffolk cartlodge, with storage room above, and asked the council HO their opinion BEFORE we bought it, wherein we were told, it just has to be 'in-keeping'. Having bought the house, we drew up the plans, and took them once again to the council, this time the Senior PO said they all looked fine. We submitted the plans, and NOW they come back and say we can't have that as it affects the listed houses 'dominance'...and that it must be single storey, with any storage in the roof area. They ignore next-doors cartlodge, admittedly single bay, but as tall as our cottage, and literally 3 metres away! Now our proposed building, is away from the house, set at the rear of the plot, behind a tall hedge, and would be painted Sadolin black. Roof-space storage is not only nowhere near large enough. I also have MS, and as my mobility decreases, I won't be able to access it anyway. So in many ways single storey works better from my perspective, but would leave an even larger footprint, which is why we discounted it before we started all this. There is much more to all this, but I sense you are losing the will to live, so will get to my question.... Are we better off getting them to write out the refusal, setting in stone their objections, or amending the original application, and facing months/years of continual goal post moving and ending up with a totally compromised building, that doesn't fulfil our need? Many thanks for your time guys. Simon