A homeowner working next to an office refurb is watching the builders next door strip out an old lath and plaster ceiling. The place is thick with dust and bits of plaster, and the builders have said the ceiling is “shot to pieces”. They want to know whether lath and plaster contains asbestos, whether it […]
Lath and Plaster Ceilings: Asbestos Worries, Overboarding and When to Take the Lot Down Read More »
An electrician has cut a small chase into the kitchen wall below a socket and just above the glass splashback to sort out some cabling. The hole now needs making good, but there's uncertainty about whether the cables should be "capped" before filling over them, what capping actually is, and the safe steps to follow
Filling a Wall Hole Around Cables Under a Kitchen Socket: Do You Need to Cap First? Read More »
A homeowner has lifted a failing patio at the back of the house and found it had been laid over timber decking with a bit of concrete near the wall – no wonder it was moving. Now the ground is opened up, they can see three ventilation channels under the door threshold that were previously
Extending Air Bricks Under a New Patio: How to Keep Sub-Floor Ventilation Working Read More »
This is a common one in UK houses. A homeowner has noticed brown blotchy stains on the wallpaper of an upstairs back bedroom, mainly clustered along the top of an external wall with a few isolated patches lower down. The brickwork outside looks sound, the loft has been checked and there’s no obvious leak, the
Brown Blotches on Upstairs Wallpaper: Damp, Leak, or Just Old Paste? Read More »
A homeowner with 12v MR16 downlights set into plasterboard ceilings needed to get at the transformer after the low-voltage lead to the bulb failed. The fittings – fire-rated JCC types with twin-tong spring clips – refused to budge despite compressing the visible clips inward. Every pull just flexed the plasterboard and started chewing up the
How Do You Remove Recessed Downlighters Without Ripping the Ceiling Apart? Read More »
Just bought your first house, the survey flags the electrics as at least 20 years old, and the fuse box is a wooden-backed unit with only a handful of circuits and no obvious RCD protection. The property has been rented out for years, you’ve got a tight budget after the purchase, and you’re trying to
Old Fuse Box on a First Home: New Consumer Unit or Full Rewire? Read More »
A homeowner fitted a smart thermostat themselves on what looked like a Y-plan system (one 3-port motorised valve, hot water cylinder, separate room stat). The wiring went in following the manufacturer’s manual and, on the face of it, everything worked – hot water on demand, heating on demand, app control all behaving. The catch: every
Pump Running By Itself On A Y-Plan System After A Smart Thermostat Swap Read More »
Question summary A homeowner has a Siamp Compact 99B side-entry fill valve in the loo cistern that won’t shut off – it just keeps filling. They’ve already swapped the inlet diaphragm but the problem hasn’t gone away. Looking at the valve, they can see water trickling out of a small hole on the body, and
Siamp Compact 99B Cistern Won’t Stop Filling – What’s Actually Holding the Water Back? Read More »
A homeowner has just had a new concrete shed base laid by a tradesman, but the finish isn’t right. One corner sits about 20mm lower than the other three, and there are smaller dips and patchy areas across the surface. They want to put a decent timber shed on it that’ll last, and they’re not
Uneven Concrete Shed Base With a 20mm Dip in One Corner: What to Do Before You Build Read More »
The question A homeowner is part-way through a rear extension and wants to fit a 3.1m aluminium bifold door set into a new cavity wall. The architect hasn’t given them a clear answer on where in the wall the frame should sit, how to bridge the cavity at the threshold, or how to get solid
