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And that's why you end up having to take the stud walls down :wink: In seriousness, glad to see everyone is using screws for their stud walls - every bit of stud wall I've ever removed was built with nails, and you could feel the play in the studs and noggins. Much more solid if you screw it...

The approach I took was to snip the coax where it entered the house upstairs, then rerouted it through to it's new location downstairs. I then moved the Virgin-branded outlet, and used a crimp-on connector (of the same design as the Virgin ones, bought a job-lot on eBay). Naughty, as you're not...

But still running in a kitchen... Of course the works were notified, right?

My consumption (1.8 NA petrol) goes from about 38mpg in summer to 34mpg in winter, so again about 10% reduction. The engine that mine is derived from was originally built to be exceptionally efficient, so has features such as a very small water jacket. This means the engine gets up to...

At school in the early 90s I had a Physics textbook that confidently explained that if a petrol engine was more than 25% efficient then it would melt the cylinder block... :lol: Re. the laptop batteries, I am constantly doing all the things you shouldn't do with a laptop and I have not...

Not true... I have the OEM hard-top with my roadster and it adds approx £50 a year to the premium. To insurers it counts as a modification, and it would not be replaced in case of damage to the hard-top or write-off of the whole car. I explained that it was an OEM part, the insurers didn't...

My grandad had a Mirafiori Abarth! By all accounts it was an absolute beast of a car, but it ended it's days at (relatively) low speed when some berk jumped a red light and T-boned it.

I know the nuisance that this sort of parking can cause. I drive down a road every day where one or two people park up on double-yellows, a PITA as it's just before a corner. If it's night-time you can watch for headlights, but in the daytime you can find yourself with a car coming at you...

My car costs £200 a year to tax, and averages anything from 35-40+mpg depending on whether it's a run, what the weather is like, how I drive it etc. Whilst ogling a particularly thirsty Jaguar, I looked up the government website on road tax bands and noticed that vans come under a different...

Coolhands: ask yourself what you're using it for and how much light you really need. If you just want it to light up when a burglar is hiding in your bushes, 3W of LED might be plenty. One of the many problems with uber-bright 500W floodlights in a domestic setting is that anything and...

I realise I went off on a bit of a ramble there! In short, my questions are: 1) If a joist is support along its length by a load-bearing wall (red brick), to what degree is the load capacity of the joist increased? 2) Is the following sufficient: 147x47mm joists with a design length of...

Whenever my OH breaks my car, leaves my house unlocked or something similar, I am very careful to remain calm and cheery and pass it off with a smile... My theory is that when I (inevitably) do something similarly daft in future, she won't give me a hard time about it. Of course, I never...

Ouch, bet that stung! It's surprising what's worse for you in these situations. I got dressed up to do some paintstripping with Nitromors. Gauntlets, goggles, heavy trousers, boots etc. All went well until I absent mindedly brushed the back of my forearm against my mouth... Sweet taste and a...

Ethernet and cable TV don't fall under BS7671, so can be run basically wherever you like as there is no safety implication. But as you say, it makes little sense to run these out of safe zones; if nothing else because you don't want to accidentally drill through one and have to dig the cable out...

Planning Permission is required to have a crossing point on a classified road, I've found this following various phonecalls and letters to get a dropped kerb put in at my house. The council department who puts them in on side roads told me "your road is a B-road, so you need Highways...

Yes, contract law is exactly what it is... not employment law. One employs an employee, one engages a contractor (or "contracts" a contractor, if one must use the American parlance). When you get a plumber round and say "Mr Plumber, your finest boiler if you please sir, installed forthwith on...

I need to move my hot water cylinder as it is in the way of a new bathroom. Space-wise, the best location would be above the stairwell, with the joists supported at one end by an external wall, and at the other by a structure yet to be defined. At the external wall end, I would use joist...

I'm planning on moving the cylinder and cold water cistern in my house to allow another project to go ahead... Doing this would also be an ideal time to convert my system from a Y-plan to an S-plan. How can I determine, for certain, whether my boiler has a pump overrun? I don't have the...

Important thing is to test drive a diesel and a petrol from whatever model you like... There are good diesels and bad diesels, likewise there are good petrols and bad petrols. From driving various hirecars, I prefer the BMW diesels to the VAG diesels: the VAG diesels are brilliant but the...