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The light in my loft isn’t in a good place and only lights up half the loft. The loft has a long pitched roof of about 7m and there is a single bayonet light about 2m into the space and the nothing lighting the rest of the way so it’s like a long cave with light at one end. I want to extend the...

My toilet won't stop running when it's been flushed until I tap the button again at which point the running stops. I'm usually quite handy but haven't managed to work out what's going on - nothing I seem to be able to adjust makes any difference. Can someone tell me what I need to do...

We have a hairline crack where the extension meets the old house that will not die. The extension build is fine, tied in, all lovely (I watched it being built so I'm not unhappy with anything the builders did). The crack is tiny - maybe 1mm wide and vertical (pretty sure it's where a sheet of...

The trickle vents in our 2nd floor loft bedroom are ridiculous - even closed it blows a gale up there when there's a storm like last night which makes the room freezing even with the heating on full blast, and crazy noisy. The blinds were blowing around last night So I'm going to block them up...

We have a very large under stair cupboard - its hard to get to the back of it. I'd like to cut down the side where I've marked on the photo, to create a smaller cupboard at the bottom end. Everything will be painted after I've finished, but I still need to be super careful to make sure that I...

I've got a lot of shaker paneling to do in my house and would like to save money by ripping full size boards into slats myself. I am a reasonably competent DIY'er with fairly decent tools but don't have a workshop or table saw or even a proper saw horse. I do have a track saw (or a circular saw...

I own a ground floor flat. The flat upstairs is tenanted and their kitchen waste pipe empties into a drain that is in my garden. Despite being told again and again not to, the tenants put endless food down the drain - rice, sweetcorn, fat and god knows what else. It collects on top of the drain...

We are planning a PD loft conversion. The house has a gable front and back, and the roof apex runs front to back, sloping side to side. At the sides there are no eaves, none at all. The roof slope ends at the brick wall, and then there's guttering along the wall. The architect tells me we need...

I've patched a couple of small areas of hearth at either side of my wood burner. They areas are both triangular, about 10cm each side of the triangle and only about 1 - 1.5cm deep, just aesthetic repair after the fireplace was altered. I know normal curing time for concrete is about 30 days, but...

We have a new central heating system. It was installed piecemeal as the house was extended, so more rads added on, and they haven’t been balanced properly so the furthest ones in the kitchen extension (which are huge column rads) are not hot enough. simple enough job to balance the rads, or so I...

I've just bought a flat where the bathroom has a sloping ceiling. The bathroom needs completely redoing. The bath is under the slope and the shower rail attached to the slope. There isn't really a better way to lay the bathroom out, but the ceiling has clearly been suffering from the damp of the...

Hoping someone can help me with fitting one of these please? I'm a normally competent landlord, and have safely managed to do simple electrics such as wiring lights and switches over the last 20 years. I own a flat in a building with a tiny communal hallway. It has one light currently wired to a...

We’ve just had an extension with aluminium (Crittal style) doors. The doors are black. I’m now painting all the new plasterboard and there are small gaps to fill around the edges where the skim coat meets the aluminium. Walls are being painted white. I’m guessing I need to use something like CT1...

We recently had a kitchen extension done to our Edwardian house and went with suspended timber floors so we could run exposed floorboards through the house to match the other rooms. We had no issues until the kitchen was fitted and heavy quartz worktops installed last week, and now suddenly the...

We’re renovating a Victorian house. One of the things I need to fix is that at some point (long long ago from the amount of dirt) the staircase has dropped slightly and the trim along the top of the stringer that runs in line with the tops of the skirting board has stayed in the original...

Hi, is there any way to remove the metal insert (the black but with the red tiles) from this slate fireplace (the white bit) without taking out the fireplace itself? There’s no chimney above so it can’t be used and we’d like to widen the space inside the fireplace to store logs for the other...

The house we're currently renovating has this fireplace and log burner I know its not fashionable, but we'd really like an open fire and not a log burner. But we don't want to reinstate the existing fire insert and have a small victorian fireplace. What we want is something like this - a...

We have an Edwardian fireplace in our house that we need to remove as we’re knocking through two rooms. It’s lovely and we’d like to move it to another room in the house so I’d like to remove it without damaging. But having dug around in the walls I can’t find out how it’s attached - there don’t...

We have a house with two bathrooms. It has a combi boiler (WB Greenstar jr 24), everything is plumbed in and fitted already and we absolutely have nowhere to put a cylinder in the house. We lived in it as a family which was when it was all fitted, and as we never really used the two showers at...

Our house is on the corner, with a road running along the side. We have an alleyway that is only 100cm wide down the side of the house (that measurement is right up to the boundary with the pavement). We don't need this space to access the garden as there is already a side gate at the end of the...