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Thanks. Actually, the cellar is not completely underground: the house is on a hill; front and side walls are completely underground, but the back wall is not underground at all, and the other side wall is a party wall to my neighbour's cellar. As I said the house is small; in fact the cellar is...

Thanks for the reply. In fact this is exactly what I plan - wooden beams spanning the room with the wooden floor of the dining room forming the kitchen ceiling (I have something similar between the ground and first floors). I'm interested to know whether I am likely to face any major problems...

Currently there is a floor of about a foot thick between my ground floor and the cellar of my (c200year) old house. In the context of some ground floor remodelling I want to remove this floor and replace it with a wooden one, which would give me more ceiling height in the cellar, in which I plan...

Mistaken entry

Apologies for the following covering a number of categories of entry. I'm thinking of trying to make more use of the cellar in my (old) house by installing the washing machine and dryer down there. I have a couple of questions: 1. The basement is mostly dry, except for one corner which has...

My neighbours recently extended their two storey house upwards alongside my four storey house, so both houses are now the same size. We now have a rather unusual structural situation where for the first two storeys of our houses we share a party wall, while for the top two stories we have...

The external wall is a thick stone wall (it is an old house) which is soon to be rendered. Just to clarify, I am going to put the panelling on the interior of the external wall, i.e. the staircase is indoors... Thanks

I'm not sure if this post is in the right place, but here goes. I intend to put some wood panelling on the walls of my stairwell. It will be against both external and internal walls. Given that the walls are not damp, do I need to treat the wood against rot? There is likely to be a small gap...

Anyone got a recipe for whitewash? It is for internal use, to be painted onto the exposed stone walls of my kitchen. I read something about mixing hydrated lime, salt and water, but I have no idea of quantities. Even better, could I add water and salt to some lime putty I made a few weeks ago...

I'm intending to remove the ceiling on the top floor of my house, in order to open up the room to the currently un-insulated attic. At the moment there are gaps between the eaves and the walls, which I presume are soffit vents, but there are no ridge vents, presumably because the air can flow...

I'm removing the ceiling from the top floor of my house in order to make the room open to the roof space. I need to insulate the roof, and having read this forum I think I will use tri-iso super 9, a kind of radiant barrier which is only 2cm thick, with plasterboard over the top. However as I...

Thanks again, the work is now finished, don't laugh but one of the radiators that has been installed (a long low one which is on feet rather than attached to the wall) stands 12 cm away from the wall. The radiator itself is 15cm wide, so you can imagine it takes up a lot of space. The fitter...

Thanks for all the replies. Having inspected the work, I noticed that, presumably while chipping away the cement around the pipes, the fitter has managed to put a large hole in the pipe that takes hot water to the bathroom, but that the radiator loop itself looks OK. So I presume that his...

Thanks for the advice, they still have the keys but I shall certainly get some more quotes, and an assessment of whether the work really needs doing or not. The boiler was installed by the previous occupants of the house (I bought the house about a year ago).

Thanks Nige, at the risk of sounding hopelessly naive, the pipes are grey, not copper, so could be iron/lead? And the system is a pressurised closed-system with a couple of year old condenser boiler feeding it

OK, I made the lime putty by stirring as much powder as I possibly could into a bucket of water. I managed to get a 25kg bag into four buckets. However, after a couple of days it seemed to be hardening rather than seperating, so I have put some water on top to stop it drying out. Do you think I...

I had a heating engineer and a couple of fitters come to my house today to install a couple of radiators and move a radiator on the middle floor of the house. I wanted the radiator moving about 50cm to the left. Not a big deal you would think. I got a call at lunchtime, could I go home as there...

Because my questions are all hypothetical, in fact you are helping me with my physics GCSE assignments... Not really. Actually the reason I post on the UK site is that none of my questions relate specifically to the Luxembourgish system, rather they are more general questions. I'm not so much...

I need to install a plug socket in a wall that has suffered from rising damp problems. Is this a bad idea? Are there any precautions I should take? Thanks in advance

Thanks for the reply; I need to use the plug socket for a washing machine so I guess it is a bad idea.