Home DIY

I'd do the same as your builder. TBF, you'll almost never look/pay attention to skirting behind a big radiator anyways.

None of them sound that satisfactory. Any better ideas?

1. Don't put skirting back in because skirting is the work of the devil.*
   
   

*We've got a friend whose husband is a fairly well known architect. He absolutely hates skirting boards and in their big victorian house he got rid of them all. I'm thinking we might do the same with our next place as I've realised I'm not a fan either, especially as Victorian skirting seems to have been designed with a gap at the bottom to let mice in.

Good call on the stain by the way! And I also like your curved coving.

On a similar tip we bought a 30s house with original picture rails throughout, we never thought we'd be picture rail wankers but they're staying, I think you can over-modernise

What was the solution - just tidily plastered walls right down to the floor? Because I've never seen that and don't believe it exists.

On a similar tip we bought a 30s house with original picture rails throughout, we never thought we'd be picture rail wankers but they're staying, I think you can over-modernise

Our 1930's flat didn't have picture rails, I had them fitted to the hall as it's 11mx1.1m and therefore made a nice gallery space running down the centre of the place.

I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work as flex in the floor would mean you need a gap of some kind to prevent the plaster cracking. Unless they used a small shadow gap or something?

How can I find out if a concrete floor is substructure/ground-bearing - presume some highly paid someone can use magic scanning tools and tell me?

Our street is built into the side of a hill. The kitchen is at the back of the house towards the top of the hill. The garden is the same height as the first floor and accessed through the back bedroom or a flight of steps in an alley to the right of the kitchen. The kitchen has wooden floor boards for the first half, then just past the fireplace there's a kind of gently sloping, coarse concrete which we're desperate to get rid of. We could presumably lay floor over it but I'd love to have a bit of extra height rather than decrease the height by building on top of it. Currently there is a step into the kitchen from the hallway (which has 5 steps up to the hallway from the porch). I'd love to remove the step and have a flat run through the entire ground floor.

Something like the dotted grey lines below (Not to scale. Walls/steps not as pissed as they look). But equally, I don't want to do this if the house will cave in or it will cost me more than the house is worth to prevent the house from caving in.

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Does their cleaner just hoover really carefully? Or do they have a Roomba?

Stop beads running round the bottom of the room probably. They're similar to a corner bead but have a single raised lip that provides an opportunity to finish the plaster neatly and in a straight line (assuming they've been tacked on with a straight line).

You then have the option of putting them on flush to the floor or with a shadow gap which will help hide and variation in floor height.

Also becoming more popular these days is skirting and architrave that sits flush with the face of the plaster. Again this uses stop beads to achieve the desired look.

Its worth noting that both of these requires the hiring decent trades as, with any simple looking finish, it's VERY easy to get wrong and will look shit if it is wrong. This makes it significantly more expensive to achieve.

it's VERY easy to get wrong and will look shit if it is wrong.

Yep, this was my thinking reading your comment and also trying to work out an alternative before you wrote it. Shivering just thinking about it.

When was the house built and what is it made of ? Odd to change floor construction mid room - perhaps to deal with the raised external levels at the rear and rotting timber floors ?.

It definitely works
https://www.themodernhouse.com/past-sales/meadow-road/

But don't ask me how!

(Edit: Apparently there is a shadow gap)

John Pawson's farmhouse shows the use of shadow gaps at the junction between floor and wall really well I think

So basically like all nice things having no skirting boards is expensive :/

John Pawson's farmhouse shows the use of shadow gaps at the junction between floor and wall really well I think

Can imagine they'd be really annoying if you didn't pay for someone to clean your house and had to actually clean it yourself.

I was just imagining a loose pea rolling under that gap and lodging itself just out of reach.

If you have any extra left over, I know @amey has been desperately looking for some.

I've got nothing against skirting to be honest.

Apart from scribe joints which I'm not a big fan of.

It is always going to cost more.
It’s more work for the carpenters/dry liners, more work for the plasterer, more work for the floor fitter, more work for the decorators and so on.
And unless any of those trades enjoy working for free, it means the customer has to pay more.
I can’t count the number of times clients have asked me to do shadow gaps instead of skirting and/or architrave!
Seems like a nice idea but if generations of craftsmen haven’t worked out a way to properly and cheaply hide the joints between two different structures then it’s not going to happen now.

Yeah but look how good it looks 😍

I don’t think that’s any more annoying to clean than skirting which is a total dust trap

ergh I didn't want to think of that!

So the room to start on next for us is the sitting room.

I'm planning to rip up the hardwood floors (sadly I didn't connect a radiator properly) and they have warped a little.

Planning to replace the hardwood with tiles, would there be a problem with tiling onto floorboards so long as a I use some plywood inbetween?

Secondly the projector thing is a bit of a pain, since I really don't want to have it handing from the ceiling if I can help it. I'm considering purchasing a short throw, but then I've got to think about power...

Got a new kitchen being installed in three weeks, I've got to rip out the old one. Anything special I need to know/do, or just have at it with screwdrivers and a crowbar? Ideally need to leave the walls fairly intact, but I'm able to plaster and tart things up before fitters arrive

Depends if you still need the old one. Hammer if not, screwdriver if yes.