Dear Santa, for Christmas I'd like a build cost that's on budget...

And as the year draws to a close, Peter the Architect is sending out a note to our prospective contractors to expect the tender pack immediately in the New Year and Mike the Quantity Surveyor is counting bricks and roof tiles.

Alan and Liz most heartily wish our readers a very Happy Christmas and all the best for 2015. We hope you're enjoying the blog - if things go to plan, this time next year we will be posting a picture of a much bigger tree in a much bigger house. Happy Christmas!!

How much?!??

I took all our quotes in to the Quantity Surveyor this morning; the revised tender pack came out to us all from the architect this afternoon, so in a couple of weeks we'll be able to answer that key question...

Milestone achieved... fizz going into fridge

From the Test Valley Planning Dept website - permission!

Building pack received today

The draft final (if you see what I mean) spec/building drawings pack plopped fatly onto the table today - so our homework tomorrow is to go through them all and make a list of any changes we require... Rather disappointed that we haven't heard from Planning yet - contrary to my earlier post, it's actually Tuesday when the statutory 2 months are up so we hope to hear maybe on Monday. Today we've been taking advantage of the sunshine to get outside - Alan's wrestled the last bit of the front hedge into submission - or possibly the other way around! Even more importantly, I've put some hooks up so we can mount the fairy lights on the front of the bungalow. Next door has set the standard - as Dan is director of a lighting company who design and install lighting systems for shops such as Harrods, we're not going to beat that, but the trusty twinkly lights will go up shortly. Meanwhile the other next door have invited us round for dinner tonight so we're off to don our party frocks.

If you can't stand the heat...

...stay away from trying to commission a kitchen, as the saying goes. This is the big area which doesn't quite have a tick in the box yet. Not because we don't know what we want! But there are some contributory factors. Firstly, as is the way when you know exactly what you want, you can't quite get exactly what we want from any of the kitchen providers we've found so far. Secondly, and more interestingly, we have a range of quotes for the units which vary from under £3K to over £13K, which are all basically for similar construction decent quality non-flat-pack painted wooden shaker-style units. There are some frills - some are oak and some are just 'wood' - but the cheapest is oak and as far as I can see literally the identical units to one of the more expensive ones. The worktop quotes vary by a similar factor - but the expensive worktops aren't matched with the expensive cupboards, of course. So now I'm going through the process of trying to get genuinely matching quotes, and it's proving ticklish. I was amused yesterday talking to Peter the Architect when he said we needed this complete so that the builder could calculate his margin:'He needs to know if it's £40K or £15K'... I pointed out that a) our error bars were narrow and b) all were set below his bottom level... This is what one of the suppliers thinks it will look like:

Tomorrow is December...

...and at the end of next week we're due for a decision from the planners. Oh I do hope they say yes! - we're waiting for any comment from the tree officer after we responded to his concerns. We've sent the schedules of all our proposed internal specs to Peter the Architect. OK, not everything is sorted but we've done all we can from here pending some clarifications from him. Oh, apart from kitchens where we're still wrestling with trying to get two suppliers to quote like-for-like. We've found ourselves a quantity surveyor who's waiting for the building drawings to drop through his postbox. Budget panic time is imminent... #adoptsKevinMcCloudvoice "Will it really come in on budget or are they going to have to make some compromises to their dream?" Guess we'll know within the next couple of weeks...

Where are we now?

Perhaps it's an appropriate time to remind ourselves where we are in the whole process. Our Planning Officer is beavering away on our application with a completion date of 9 December for a decision - the Tree Officer had some queries about how we will protect the trees which are to remain, hopefully he's happy with our response. Peter the architect and his team are likewise beavering at detailed drawings and we're trying to tie down as many elements of the spec as possible. Big chunks not yet finalised are the heating system and the windows. The heat calculations suggest we need between 2 & 3kw to heat the whole house when it's freezing outside - which is roughly the two heated towel rails in the bathrooms plus a little heater in the ventilation system. So we'll have to open the doors when we run the logburner... The average boiler and heating infrastructure generally is set up to deal with old-tech much less well insulated houses. Oil, wood pellet etc don't make small enough boilers to match our heat needs - the only units small enough are LPG. Windows are of course part of this sum - you need good windows to retain the heat. Aside from the big ones, ours are small (!), so we really need to focus on getting the big north windows heat- and draught- proof. Although the payback period for triple glazing is huge, there's a suggestion that by minimising any convective draughts triple glazing actually does rather better than the direct heat loss calculations would suggest. So we'll probably go triple on the big windows and take the cheaper option on the small ones. We're tempted to go tilt and turn for the bedroom windows, anybody got any comments? In particular any experience of Jeld Wen t&t which seem to be very 'sensibly' priced - but are they any good? Oh, and did I say? Stainless steel for the gutters - contemporary and stylish, huh!