Recent content by clifford1

The ground appears to slope considerably, going uphill left to right as viewed in the pictures. Your own raised section, as judged by the top of the brick wall holding the ground up, appears to be several feet above the bottom of your back door, and only a few inches lower than his decking. Is...

"It's owned by a limited company with a limited share capital, so unless there other assets of value, I doubt there will be a re build." The directors are also charged personally.

They will presumably be required to build it back crooked, otherwise it wouldn't be the Crooked House. There'd be no point in a "Used to be Crooked House" pub that wasn't even old.

"3m2 is the same as three square metres," It's confusing notation. 3m2 is a clumsy way of writing m with a little 2 raised above the m. Word automatically detects this usage and writes it as intended, but basic emailers and forums don't usually have a way of doing that. So 3m2 looks...

The skirting will be heated by radiant, not convected, heat, If the stove is set back in the alcove then a straight line from the heat source will cross the corner edge of the wall and barely touch the skirting at all. I'd stop the skirting an inch from the corner anyway, with a bevelled edge...

There are thousands of acres of empty land where the rain just lands and then soaks or runs away somewhere. Then someone builds a shed and there becomes a need to have gutters, downpipes, and somewhere special for the rain to go. Unless it has a thatched roof, and then it just goes where the...

My experience, FWIW, with an old cottage that has always been "attached" to the main house is that possession of an individual address is entirely through the local postman and also the council electoral register officer. You just tell them what the address is and who lives there and it's done...

The gravel supplier we used (in the open countryside, not urban) said it's important to get the right kind of gravel for the job. Avoid rounded stones - the best are about an inch across and a rough approximation to a cube as possible. They don't roll under the impact of car wheels, but slowly...

I have read that there were a lot of big country house fires when they first started using steel beams because of failure to take into account that steel conducts heat away from fire places so puts other spots at risk, whereas traditional wooden joists are poor conductors of heat.

"legally they need to leave a 1m gap to allow for fence maintenance" Most terrace houses would have hardly any gardens left if the fences had to be a metre apart

So if you live on the slopes of a mountain the height restriction could be hundreds or thousands of feet, rather than the height at your back fence?

Does "adjacent" mean in all directions, or only sideways? However close "adjacent" means, does it stop at your boundary?

You can have a window in a door, you can have a window that is a door, you can have a door in a window. You can have an arrow slit in a castle that is neither a door nor a window. Before I converted it, our kitchen was the old dairy, and it didn't have any glazed windows, just holes with wooden...

Become an assessor yourself, and then you will know! I'm sure you would not be allowed to assess your own properties, but you would learn the top secret wizardry that the experts use. :)

A couple of stout nails, partly pre-drilled to ensure they hammer in straight and don't split the wood.