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I bought a house with painted walls at the back, it took me weeks of work to strip this unsuitable non breathable paint from a brick wall done by previous owners which was hiding badly deteriorated brickwork and terrible quality pointing. It is the height of laziness to paint over a brick wall...

Yep quite possibly the drain valve was there first. Still shouldnt be in that spot as if the previous homeowners had the french doors installed they should have also had the valve moved. Their 'step' was a couple of loose bricks with a slab on top. It won't be possible to access an underfloor...

How would I ever access it if it's under the floor?

In this case they have only fitted one drain, not two as a previous poster pointed out. So if the intention was to fully drain the system they've only done half a job. Draining the system into the subfloor, if it was necessary you'd surely drain as much as possible first off the rads then all...

Strange I've never seen this before, I've lived in a number of houses and asked around my friends and nobody has this. I'm still not really understanding what the point of it is. The pipework is all subfloor downstairs and accessing it would require floor covering and floorboards to be lifted...

I've never seen an arrangement like this in any house before. Are they usually hidden?

Is there an alternative solution? What's done in modern houses with buried pipework in the floor?

Is this the normal way of doing it? As it's a bit of a bodge isn't it? Is there a better way to do it, as it's definitely in the way for future step.

Hi, My house has suspended floors, so all the heating pipework has been done subfloor downstairs, with rising pipework to each radiator. At the back of the house a drain valve has been installed which has been put through an outdoor airbrick. See picture. Obviously the fact it's outside means...

Do you think it really needs 3 airbricks there? Could I get away with deleting the middle one?

Render is off. Red paint underneath now also mostly removed using a 40 grit flap disc. The brickwork here is pretty poor, whoever fitted the french doors did a poor job as it should have been repaired properly when the doors/windows were out. Repointing tomorrow.

If I only cut out to the DPC level then that will leave those three airbricks proud. It looks like they were installed at the same time as the render was done, as they are flush with it. If breaking off all the render I would be replacing the airbricks with single plastic ones as I have done on...

I have some render on a small section of wall around some french doors as per picture below. Its been painted with a horrible thick paint over many layers and years. Its also rendered over DPC nearly to ground level, actually it was below the level of the paving that was there that Ive started...

Hi, Been doing some more work on the exterior of my house. Ive had areas of water damaged brickwork replaced, stripped horrible thick paint from large sections of wall, had a section of wall professionally repointed, and Ive repointed a section of a wall myself too. Im now lifting pretty old...

How do you tell if loft is ventilated enough? On my 30s house there are no dedicated soffit vents and it's been felted. But presumably it won't be air tight, there will be gaps in places I imagine and there are old cables and pipes through in places.

When its colder outside we get condensation forming on the bedroom windows in the morning when we wake up (in our bedroom, plus in the other bedroom we don't use, it happens there too, so its not only the breathing that is causing it). These are fairly modern double glazed windows with trickle...

I have a similar problem. 1930s solid wall house. Just cant seem to get humidity down. We're constantly in the 70% humidity range even with the heating on. There's no obvious cause. A couple of gutters drip slightly in heavy rain, but nothing significant. There are airbricks and trickle vents...

I have one of those slightly curved brick jointer tools to smooth it out with.

Hi, Lots of conflicting information online on this topic. I have a mid 1930s house with solid brick walls and I need to repoint. I am doing one area currently but eventually the whole house needs doing. Sections have been done in the past (before I owned it) and it looks like they've used a...

Here's more photos of the area.