Bobbo completely renovates and extends his tired 1950s bungalow

Trap door, you say...

There's a fine line between an underground room accessed via a trap door, and a dungeon.

This. Just make sure that you don't dig a well down there and also try to avoid storing lotion down there.

My initial thought was this;

Yeah, Buffalo Bill is slightly more light-hearted than Herr Fritzl.

Just call it a Priest Hole.

Nothing quite so macabre. There is a company that does pre fab. Dig a big hole, plonk in it. Bob's your uncle and Fanny's your aunt.

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http://www.colinfurze.com/bunker.html

Yeah, Buffalo Bill is slightly more light-hearted than Herr Fritzl.

Ok, one is fictional, but...

Some change.. it will be interesting to see what planning think.. it's a tricky site as it sits on the corner and has a house one side and bungalow on the other..

it will be interesting to see what planning think.

I know but I'm hoping that the fact that there is a good mix of single and two story housing round here counts in my favour. I have contingencies which will involve VERY complex roof layouts but I'm happy to see what comes of this. When planning reopens.

What's the correlation between building your own bunker and owning a tandem? I get that not every tandem owner has a bunker, but if you decide to spend lots of money to live like a naked mole-rat, surely n+1 can never be an issue with your SO?

Nice floor plan.
Have you intentionally omitted a specific dining area?

No, but most of the labelling on the floor plan is not going to be its intended end use. There is also some re-jigging of the floor plan to come however a lot will depend on spans of joists and the location of beams.

So after much tooing and froing and indecision on the part of my wife. We have finally got the drawings ready to be submitted to the planners. Not much change from the drawings I posted before but the floorplan is now finalised.

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Next step is to submit the planning application. I don't have much experience with this so we are going to pay the architects to manage it. I'm hoping that it's going to be a straightforward experience but have been told not to hold my breath. There is a good mix of single / two story housing in the area so even if we don't get it on the first round there is every chance that an appeal will be successful. Fingers crossed.

Where do the bikes go?

In the garage.

We used MBC in Ireland to achieve better than .6 airtightness for our timber frame. They were half the price of the nearest equivalent (£45k for over 100sqm) and they were open to using Oak in a few key areas to avoid the 'panel' look... you should check them out.

Lovely guys, on site at the crack of dawn, very considerate and hard workers, had the frame up (actually two houses totalling over 200sqm for £90k) in ~4 days.

Good luck with planning, ours was approved on appeal (despite being in an AONB) due to debating the natural edge of the town. We then re-applied to increase the scale of the build marginally: from 2 bed to 3 bed with an extra 300mm on the roofline to enable a converted loft. Oh and we added two sheds. We had a few conditions applied, but nothing that wasn't fair.

Being on the smaller side (building something that is in high demand) seemed to get us over the line.

I'm really looking forward to seeing this take shape. I wish I could contribute something useful to repay all the DIY thread advice. Let me know if you'd like any A level History or Politics lessons as a break from building work.

Thanks for the recommendation. While I'm keen to do the vast majority of the build myself I'm pretty determined to do all of the green aspects. I honestly believe that this is the way that domestic construction is going and think that in the next 5 - 10 years it will be hard to get planning permission without at least conducting a feasibility study to asses what airtightness / insulation measures can be done. By doing this I get to add strings to my bow and also get ahead of that curve.

I was thinking about this only yesterday and was wondering how things have progressed in the midst of this Covid malarkey

Still waiting on planning, which was submitted late August. The decision was meant to be made by the 17th December and still no word. On the plus side we have had no objections but the architect says that there is no guarantee that the planning officer will not find something they don't like.

On top of this it is now likely that the decision will take a lot longer. According to the architect who is overseeing our application planning officers' performance is generally judged by the council based on a percentage of the number of decisions made on time. Therefore because the decision on our place has run over it goes into the "when I have time" to-do list subsequently I'm taking it in turns with the architect to phone the officer in charge of the application and cheerfully ask him if he's made a decision, we're aiming to be persistent enough to be mildly annoying and remind him we aren't going away without completely pissing him off.

We've just withdrawn our application (bungalow conversion) due to feedback from the planners and may even sack our architect...! Tweak the plans then resubmit...
I believe if they've gone way over the estimated decision date you can:

https://www.planningportal.co.uk/info/200232/planning_applications/58/the_decision-making_process/5

Given the work we will be doing involves 2 sides of the property facing onto a public highway and a change in the ridge height we knew that there was a lot of things that planning officers don't traditionally like because of that we went for an architect that I knew already who specialises in trickier projects from a planning perspective. Otherwise we would have probably got a structural engineer who practices as a building designer and saved ourselves some cash.