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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...

We're about to renovate our old house to rent it out. It will have three bathrooms when its finished. The house currently has a combi boiler, which I'm aware isn't great if two people want showers at the same time. This wasn't a problem for us living there but probably will be for tenants when...

We have a very large (1500mm wide) upvc sash window in our kitchen, and we're having problems with it leaking out from under the interior window cill when there is driving rain (which is quite often here as our house is quite exposed). The whole house had new windows replaced at the same time...

A section of render on the side of our house was damaged when we were having the coping stones of the flat roof replaced on our extension. It's been repair patched but where it has been painted it now looks glaringly white compared to the rest of the render. Its right on the most visible bit of...

We have a mysterious leak in our new extension and we're struggling to work out what's going on. I'm not convinced posting photos will help with understanding what's going on as the leak doesn't appear to be coming from anywhere visible so there's nothing exactly to take photos of, but to give...

we have a very beautiful Victorian front door that is in overall very good condition, but isn’t fitting tight with the frame at one corner. Having never adjusted a door before I’m reluctant to take out the old hinges until im sure the correct thing to do, but need to sort it out as it’s very...

We've uncovered a well in the foundations of our new extension. We plan to put a glass cover on the top to have as a feature in the new kitchen floor, but whilst we can access it, I'd also like to put in the capability to pump the water to use to irrigate the garden. I'd prefer not to use a...