A decision has been made ....

Before I forgot when we made it and how we feel at the this moment in time I need to quickly get this down.  I finally received the QS's report in a format that hasn't let me understand the detail i.e. the labour and materials are not spilt up into different sections which I thought was what we had asked for!  Anyway it's all a learning curve and I can take lots of time trying to contact him again without any extra charge! whoope I can hardly wait.

The long and short of it was that if we wanted a house that was just to the building regs standard we could indeed manage to scrap the necessary money together just without important factors like having any type of surface on the yard or landscaping (ok that can certainly wait) or indeed anything to do with a sustainable house which completely missing the point of how we're trying to build this house.  So I made a long list of all the additional items that needed to be included some where more Rolls Royce solution but at this point I don't feel like I want to compromise in for example putting up solar PV when the Feed In Tariff is actually a far better investment long term than any savings account and more importantly we could reduce our electricity consumption /  independence on the grid.

So Harry is now working on a smaller design without a void which never really had us convinced.  How can you really have a truly environmental house when all the heat is going upwards?  I think we're have to take the original plans out of planning which will be ok as long as Harry takes them out apparently before four weeks into the planning process.  I feel much happier knowing that we're still have a wonderful house with all the right materials and still being true to our beliefs.

Garden party at the Ropewalk

Last week we went around the neighbouring houses (including all of Toby Mill estate) and dropped off invitations to come and look at the plans, have a glass of elderflower cordial and a slice of cake.  We had some people which was nice probably not as many as we would have liked but they've now had their chance!

Building projects just seem to swallow up time!  Before you've contacted someone and then got a response it's been at least one week.  I've managed to have a good chat to Keith the QS about getting surface areas of the house plan.  This is then hopefully going to enable me to at some point in the near future to ring up some manufactures i.e. porotherm and have some comparable costing for our next meeting with Harry. In short the QS price is within budget if we don't want to have an environmentally designed house!  So we've got to have an uncomfortable conversation about ways to reduce the total cost of the build which in my view just needs have the whole footprint reduced in size.  This is slightly irritating as Tom always said we needed a 200 m2 build which we did convey this to Harry who hasn't taken it too seriously so now the build which has been submitted for planning (there's another story) is about 30 m2 too big.  Surely it's better to resubmit with an amendment of size reduction?