Search results

I thought this was going to be easy! Replacing old loo and cast-iron pipes. There is a very neat ~110m hole ready for me. New, plastic pipe needs to go through wall, turn 90 degrees in order to join up with the soil stack. Just like 90% of every stack not lucky enough to have the pipe come out...

Am doing a bathroom Reno; doing the preparation myself but will be getting someone in to do tiling and plastering. I am planning to use cement backer (wedi or similar) around a wet shower area, with a glass screen. The wall there is plastered, flat and in reasonable condition, so 6mm board...

I have a 1930s built house, where the foundations are a concrete raft and most of the ground floor is then a raised timber floor on top of that. The utility room that I wish to tile is not on raised timber, it has concrete. It has changed shape from the original layout, so has a small strip of...

So in my continued journey of window replacement - I am trying to remove glass for fitting the frames, and then reassembling once that's done. Most of the guides I can find refer to uPVC, and my ones seem to have different challenges. These are glazed from the inside. The panes have horizontal...

Possibly daft question. I'm installing some new alu frames. I have got fischer frame fixing screws (a la https://www.toolstation.com/shop/p85179?table=no). Unfortunately it seems that the glass is on 1mm packers. This means the screwhead sitting proud interferes with the glass when replaced...

I'm replacing windows in a 1930s house which at some point someone has clearly re-painted the existing steel frames, and done a poor job as there is paint up the sides of the reveal. It's not a huge amount, but enough to be annoying. I've tried "Paint Panther" (ho ho), but probably because the...

Hi I have a honeywell evohome installation that uses HR92 TRVs on ordinary radiators. Works well, I like. Kitchen/Dining room extension in progress. ~45m^2. Am going to install UFH. Probably single zone. I would like to integrate with evohome. I am confused by what products I would need to do...

I have a bathroom where the entire floor (including joists) have been replaced. I intend to use a 22mm 'wet room' style tile-over tray, so I have mounted 18mm ply between the joists for support. (I've actually continued this for the entire room since the bath we're looking at looks heavy, I had...

2x steel beams in a kitchen/dining room, both hidden in the ceiling. Fireline (pink) plasterboard has been used whenever there has been steel above, "ordinary" elsewhere. Is this sufficient, or is it required to do 2 layers of plasterboard (I thought that was only if we were using non-fire...

So, we're after building a boundary wall. 1m high. We'd like it to fit in and match the style opposite, which looks like a limestone wall, mortared. Every time I google for stone suppliers, I get dry stone walls, which this isn't. I assume I need blocks rather than "walling". Any tips for...

Planning ahead for a kitchen central island, with in an ideal world extracting either into the disused chimney flue, or to the side wall. Of course, the joists go the wrong way for that. They are relatively large however - 8" at 12-14" centres, for a ~3m span. The whole ceiling will be down...

~42m^2 kitchen/dining room, L-Shape, big sliding doors on one end. Late 30s house. Going to have screeded subfloor with UFH. Want herringbone style top layer. Probably oak. Option a) Engineered blocks glued down. Sounds more stable. Option b) Reclaimed solid blocks. Might look better for...

Extension with over-sized windows. When I've done this previously, BCO allowed area-weighted calculation based on the floor area of the final room (25% floor area of room + extension). Seemed reasonable to me as the spirit of 25% is clearly for the actual living space. This time round...

We're having an extension to a room reconciled slightly, with an increase to floor area of, oh, 7m^2. Building Control has this wonderful inclusion on their queries, with regards to our (gas) heating: confirm the existing system will be calibrated and adjusted to be energy efficient and a...

We're having a small extension + kitchen/dining room wall taken out to make one open plan space. The existing building (1938) has mostly vented timber flooring, though in the kitchen a small area is concrete (and I suspect under the cabinets is, too). As ever, the flooring has competing...

I have a few questions about how structural beams are connected for a project I'm doing. I have all the structural calculations, padstones, joints from a SE, I'm not putting the beams in myself - this is quite probably obvious to any decent builder, I'm just interested to understand - not least...

So my mission to replace old single glazed steel windows continues. Our single glazed windows, unless I'm much mistaken, are like [1]. They are odd-leg frames, in imperial sizes, where the long-leg extends 1/2" more than the short. I am intending to replace them with [2], in I assume in a...

Hi We have a house built 1938, which has single-glazed crittall windows - with all the problems that entails. I am intending to replace them with alu double-glazed units which I will be fitting myself (as a part of a larger project which will involve the BCO anyway) - and was wondering if...

Our thermostatic shower valve is misbehaving (1 year old, bathstore, not impressed). The instructions casually say "remove retaining ring" (see attachment). Um... how? It's threaded and pretty stiff; tools can't really get to it - forcing a pair of screwdrivers in gives no joy. I even tried...

I am considering some options around remodelling the back of my property to knock down an existing flat-roofed construction and replace it with a marginally larger one with large glass doors (roof size of ~5m by 2m or thereabouts), with probably a zinc roof. I will require a structural engineer...