We negotiated with Hattens Farm Nursery and will get our ‘Saxon plus’ mix – with fewer hawthorn and more of the other species. We will also get a number of trees that we will plant on our west boundary, to start screening the garage/shed next door. We are getting bare-root plants, mostly 1-2 year-old whips, something for us to do during our visit in the first weekend in November! They will be posted up just before we arrive, so they spend as little time as possible out of the ground.
We had agreed with our architect back in May that he would revise his 2012 submission to a) keep the west section at original length, to match the east section and b) redesign the interior for 5 bedrooms. He would take his time, but submit them to Aberdeenshire council in September 2015, just inside the deadline for a significant tightening of building standards. He would then take his time responding to queries etc. to get the revised planning permission and building warrant by, say May 2016. By that time we thought we would be ready to build.
He did indeed submit in mid-September. We noticed that APP/2015/2897 had appeared on the council website and followed progress – not a lot, none of the reports recommended any additional delay or expenditure.
The application went through with no issues, undoubtedly a tribute to the skills & experience of the architect. We do not have to pay any planning gain – the school is still under capacity and the difference between 4 and 5 bedrooms was regarded as not worth collecting. So it was cheaper than we expected – £401 to Aberdeenshire council and £1,443 to the architect.
At the risk of sounding repetitive…
The accommodation: The final planning permission design was as previously agreed.
The East end of the building has the master bedroom/en-suite and the single garage on the ground floor. Upstairs is a self-contained suite of rooms comprising bathroom, bedroom and a room that is notionally the home office. The latter two cannot have a door between them, due to fire regulations. The only access is from the stairway and the official fire escape is a large roof light overlooking the courtyard.
The West end of the building has two bedrooms, the family bathroom and a public room downstairs – this has a rather large window overlooking what will be garden. The upstairs layout is similar to the East end – bathroom & bedroom, but with an adjoining galleried area overlooking the public room.
The North section connects the other two. It is single-storied with a lounge/dining room and a separate kitchen/family room. Both around 7m long and 4m wide. at the west end we will have our front door, hallway, utility room, plant room and the stair to the West end of the property. At the other end a pantry and the stair to the East end.
Thermal properties: We have balanced cost & utility against thermal efficiency. We have no desire to go the PassivHaus route, but do want a well-insulated, comparatively low-energy house. We also want as much natural light as possible. So we are somewhere inside current building standards, but have as much glass as we can. By a quirk of the SAP calculations, we will get a band C certificate, i had hoped for band B. This is really down to woodburners no longer being counted as carbon neutral and to our high surface area to volume; to go to B, we would have had to compromise on natural light and really up the insulation. We are undecided on double- or triple-glazing
Heating & energy: We will have a 12kW (output) ground-sourced heat pump, to be located on the west-most wall overlooking next-door’s driveway. For winter top-up we will have an 18kW woodburner, this needs to feed under floor heating and hot water.
For spring/summer/autumn water heating we will have a 4kWp PV array on our south-facing roof, backed up by an immersion heater. Any spare electricity from the array will, of course, be used elsewhere in the property and, as a last resort put back into the grid. We will do sums nearer the time to see whether we want to go a) the MCS-certified route and claim the feed-in tariff or b) buy the panels, inverters and other electronics for half the price and DIY.
Having three such different sources of energy means we would want a thermal store, These hold large amounts of water which is typically hotter at the top for domestic hot water and cooler at the bottom for underfloor heating. The GSHP would heat the bottom of the tank, the woodburner the middle and top. The immersion heater would be at the top. The hot water supply is fed cold from the rising main and passes through a heat-exchanger. The big advantage here is having hot and cold water at the same mains pressure. The system will be completely un-pressurised, we will need a feed and overflow tank for the woodburner.
Services: We have mains water and electricity (100A supply). We have a copper phone line which is ‘exchange-only’ and supports low-capacity broadband. We have variable 3G/4G mobile signal.
We will have a standard surface-water drainage system going to a soakaway down the bottom of our plot. The foul water drain will go to a septic tank and, because of the high water table and low permeability of the plot, effluent will be pumped up to a raised drainage mound some 7m x 10m. We were not particularly happy with this but we have no water course on our property to run effluent from a mini STP to.
The exterior: The outside granite walls will be ‘picked and pointed’, the roof will be slated. Windows/doors could be stained wood, although we are leaning towards wooden frames with powder-coated aluminium facings, which are just about maintenance-free.
Any outside-facing walls we demolish we will restore to match the originals – they look to have been built in layers of two courses of large stones, with a leveled surface between layers.
Planning conditions
The one thing we did need to do was fulfill the condition of providing a set of photos of the original structure to the council. The architect had some of his own, we picked 22 more, zipped them up and emailed them to him.
East Byreleask Steading 