Update on the Deed of Easement

Got this text from the seller (Andy) on Friday .. "I have just driven to Ali's office (5pm Friday Heathrow !!!) and have a signed copy in my hand! Will drop to my solicitors over the weekend. Cheers. AA". He is referring to the Deed of Easement which we needed the neighbour to sign so we can connect to his drainage. This simple piece of paper has caused a delay of around 2 monthis in completing the purchase of the land.. so good this has finally been sorted out. We really should almost be there by now. We should be able to complete the purchase next week and then we can actually start on the build.

Budgets

I need to brief Harris on budget constraints to temper some of his research into electronics. A 70 inch OLED TV may well physically fit into the lounge but unless there are some drastic price reductions unlikely to fit into the budget !

Games Consoles (and some T.V'S)

I'm really excited about playing on the PS3 in my new bedroom (where it will probably be) on a 40" 1080p T.V (Hopefully) we are still deciding on what to get for the rooms. XBOX 360's will be used as media extenders which is good for when the long awaited Project Natal for XBOX comes out. Alicia will have the Wii in her room with a similar T.V to mine, and I cant wait to play some new PS games in 1080p. Were expecting to get a 70" LED T.V probably Samsung because they are one of the few companys that do the quite new LED T.V's. I cant wait to play something like Gran Turismo 5 (expected to be relesased late this year) because of its graphic quality. They have also begun making 3D PS3 games so am also looking forward to some good ones to buy . That's basically all i can say about what i'll have to wait a while to get but hopefully during this wait more new stuff is released ready for once the house is ready for us to move into. Everone is very excited, not to mention myself.

Progress on the Purchase

We signed the Deed of Transfer and Deed of Easement documents. We just need these to be signed by the seller and the neighbour then I think that finally completes all the formalities on the purchase of the land.. so 5 months in to the project we finally reach... step 1 !

Site Pictures

As you can probably see from the weather these pictures were taken in February 2009 shortly after the heavy snow fall in the South. Just taken a while to put them up - they show the building plot fenced off and some of the views over the park. When we finally complete on the land purchase I will put up some more recent pictures to show the site in summer.

Naming the House

We have lots of time to sort this out but one of the debates has been the name of the house. We did think of something like Parkside because we are right next to a park. However we are still thinking about other options. We have a large oak tree next door and also some woods so Oaktree House, Oaktrees, Woodside or Woodlands are also options. Perhaps even Park View as the main room has great views of the park.

Deed of Transfer

We got our paperwork through on Friday 12th June to sign the Deed of Transfer. Another step closer to finally completing on the purchase of the land.

Multi Media

We are going to have a Hi-Tech Multimedia system which we are going to design ourselves. I have been given the job of chief architect for multi-media and all the technology in the house.

We are going to have the server room in the study. This will house a rack mounted server and the switch panel for the network. We are going to install cat 6 throughout the house and also run coax cable to all the main living areas.

The server rack will include a media PC running windows home server. This will be able to stream video, audio and photographs to any devices around the house via the LAN and the use of media extenders (including XBOX, PS3 and portable devices). There will also be a wireless LAN which will be used to connect to the various laptops.

The main server will be backed up regularly to the internet via a skydrive service.

There will be 4 main plasma/LCD/LED screens. One in the living room, one in the family room, one in Alicias bedroom and one in Danial's bedroom. We are also thinking about a small screen in Dad's room in the gym area. We will also have a projector and screen in Danials room for home cinema and gaming.

We are thinking about implementing virgin boxes throughout the house rather than sky as we prefer virgin broadband and phone services. We will be implementing freesat so we can access MTA but we will also be able to access that via the internet to any screen in the house.

We are not going for a centralised concept - we will have the devices close to the screens where they will be used. This may limit flexibility but should make the system easier to use and more reliable. In time everything will be channelled through the media server which will result in the ultimate flexibility but the technology is just not mature enough yet.

We will have recording capabilities to the virgin boxes, but also hard drive recorders and a PVR installed on the media server. That should be more than sufficient.

Our main viewing room will be in the living room. Here we will have our large plasma screen (over 50 inch) and a surround sound system with roof or wall mounted speakers. We will have a nice multi-media amp here, with a blu ray DVD player as well as the Virgin HD box and the HD media extended to connect to the media server. Nice !

Games consoles will mainly be divided between Alicia's and Danial's room - probably the PS3 in Danials and the Wii in Alicia's with the XBOX in the living room.

Designing my room!

My dad handles all the legal stuff because I think designing is much more fun. It's true that he is very clever so he knows more about law than me. I'm not thinking of becoming a lawyer in the future anyway. I will deisgn my own room and most of the stuff will be purple. I am excited about my en-suite too!

Power sources

We have a planning requirement that 10% of the energy needs to come from renewable sources. Sounds simple but it is amazing how little even the experts know about how to do this. Maybe most people just dont bother and maybe the planning departments never actually check. Howeber, the last thing you want is a problem at the late stage of a build so I did a lot of research up front and talked to different people. The best option would have been a ground source heat pump and we even made the utility room bigger to accomodate this. However there was not enough ground outside for the ground loops which would mean digging deep bore holes which would have been very costly. The cost of this virtually ruled out this option. So we decided on an air source heat pump. The main downside of these is that they might be noisy and they also produce less power than ground source. However we are assured they will be sufficient to generate 10% and the company providing them will write an energy statement to support this. Solar panels by themselves would probably not be sufficient but we have the option of using them as a top up if required. These can be costly but can be added at a late stage in the build if required. We are very tempted by having a ventilation system for heating and cooling but it will add quite a bit to the build cost and we have to see if we can fit it into the budget.

En-suite or not

One of the big debates was organising an ensuite for Alicia which was not on the earliest plans. The original drawings had two family bathrooms.. when Alicia saw this she was not too pleased. However, as Alicia's requirements are very important we had to redesign the middle floor and we split the family bathroom into two - an ensuite for Alicia and a separate WC. This means a total of 3 bathrooms in the house with 2 additional WC's. Lets hope you are not desperate to go to the toilet because with 5 to choose from you might wet yourself while making the decision.. I suppose you could just go for the closest.. but that would be too obvious ! We looked at so many options - including making Alicia's ensuite a Jack and Jill bathroom to allow access to it from the main corridor but these were all ruled out for various reasons. The final design means the family bathroom is on the top floor and the second bedroom does not have a bathroom.. but in the circumstances it is the best compromise.

A question of drains

When we got the estimate from Thames Water of around £20,000 for connecting to the drains it came as a shock. We were literally just about to exchange contracts at the time and it was lucky for us we were able to delay this. However even more fortunately we found that we could connect to the drains next door we just needed a legal document called a Deed of Easement to be signed by the neighbour. However, sorting this out has caused a few weeks delay and is still in progress at the moment. Once done we can complete on the land purchase. You can see our house and the neighbours and where we will make the connection. The neighbour could have asked for money to allow the connection but he did not as long as we promised to make any repairs to his property and the fence caused by the work we would need to do. We are fortunate that we are going have great neighbours to live next door to.

Rizwana wants to see a house

Just showing Rizwana the blog and her first reaction.. "Darling, why can't we see the house in Cheam which costs more than 1 million pounds ?" My response "Ok my dear make the appointment and while you are at it try and meet a millionaire !"

Brick Match

One of our early tasks was to choose the bricks. We saw a house near where we live which we liked the look off and decided to try and match. Not as easy as you might think. In the end we chose a brick called Hathersage blend from a company called Terca. An interesting mix of colours - lets hope it looks good when the house is built. Not really a match to the house we saw.. a bit warmer and maybe even better.

Original Plan

Here are some early plans of the proposed house. We worked hard on these and have created some more recent drawings which I will upload when they are finalised. It was a great experience working with the architect Jim Langley who did an excellent job for us.

Welcome to our blog

Here we will from time to time document our first (and most likely last) house build. It seems such a long time since we stood on the building plot on 31st January and shook hands with the seller Andy Abbosh when we agreed the purchase price. I was just about to travel to Malaysia a few days later and was expecting that everything would be sorted out shortly after my return. No such luck ... up to now we still have not completed on the land purchase ! However (fingers crossed) we expect this to happen very very soon.