Home DIY

No worries - I really like the effect and colour of some of their limewashed paints and think it will go nicely with the raw wooden beams. The difficulty is that there are wooden panels we want to paint in the same colour. So deciding between that and F&B

I've been getting emails from Brouns & Co, they seem to have all sorts of more traditional paint.

I would pick Little Greene over F&B but there's also Benjamin Moore who make some really good paint.

Squeaky floorboards: any way to fix them without lifting first? One is in the bathroom so likely in close proximity to some pipes and/or cables.

I usually try a bit of talcum powder before anything else but it doesn't always work or if it does it takes a while to work its way into the squeaky bits.

Replace any nails with screws, just in case the boards are lifting somewhere when you stand on another part.

Who do I call : plumber or Thames water?
We have a shared water main into our house (with a house above). When our tap is on I can hear the meter spinning round. When our tap isn't on I can hear the meter spinning around (because upstairs use water, the bastards).
In the last couple of days, it sounds like the meter is always spinning and the downstairs toilet(yes get me) there's a trickling noise to a pipe.

I don't think we've got a leak, I'd have noticed inside, I don't get on with upstairs enough to ask.

Maybe a silly question, but have you checked that the cistern isn't stuck open for some reason?

Flooring question:

I'm laying a T&G chipboard subfloor on a suspended timber floor frame for my garden office.

I've realised (rather slowly, as ever) that the tabs of the joist hangers are going to give me a headache when it comes to keeping things flat.

It's only the centre cross joist (I have no idea what it's called) that's going to be a problem - the band joists will have the sill plates of the wall frames on them.

Does it makes sense to have 6mm ply laid across the whole thing, but out over the hanger tabs?

Another flooring question - what % wastage do people usually add when buying flooring? Doing our hallway - pretty small, about 10 sq m. Is 20% reasonable?

checked that the cistern isn't stuck open for some reason?

Definitely do this.

Some friends renovated their house. The husband is an engineer and very handy so did everything. They were being charged a fortune in water, so they understandably kicked off and got a refund.

Just to be on the safe side they checked all the plumbing only to notice that one of their toilets was constantly flowing ever so slightly and obviously had been for months.

The amount of flooring that comes in each package will mostly determine that, won't it?

(For something that small)

Buying reclaimed by the sq m, but a rough idea on wastage % would help.

20% sounds in the right ballpark. I aim for <10%, but then I am planning all of my cuts particularly pedantically.

Yeah, 20% might be a bit high, but £20 for an extra metre (10%) is probably worth the peace of mind.

Generally 10%. It does depend on the specific materials though.

That was my first check.
I'll have to wait again.

There's a whole load of shared pipes (old gas, water, and waste) that run between ours and theirs.

This is probably a very common problem, but I have don't know what the common solution would be. As a guess, I reckon in the trade one would ignore it and accept the 3-4mm in the flooring. One possibly crazy option to consider, router out the underside of the chipboard as you go to clear the hangers? Or as its softwood could you depress them with a hammer?

I'm not thrilled about either idea though.

in the trade one ignore it and accept the 3-4mm in the flooring

Probably even less - more like 1mm

But I'd always notice it.

And it would probably squeak.

Routing actually seems like a sensible idea. With my luck, hammering would just mush the boards.

What's the proper way to block up a chimney? This is what I found. Seems less than optimal.

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It's blocked, isn't it? What's the problem?

Seems less than optimal

Cowboy builders will always find creative ways to get rid of shit. In my place, it was to dig it in to the garden. Which would normally be easy enough (well, simple, not easy) to fix. However, the knotweed (which the company who treated it reckoned it probably came from the dumped shit) means i can't dig up the garden lest I risk reactivating it. I would need to dig down a good few feet all of my garden and my neighbours for the removal treatment.

There’s normally a few more dead birds for insulation.

Keep filling it with expanding foam until it comes out the top of the chimney.

Cowboy builders will always find creative ways to get rid of shit.

Not even them. On the Cul-de-sac I lived as a kid our house was one of the last to be built so everything got burnt there from the rest of the street. The garden soil was full of 'clinker'.

The neighbour took 10 years to get a perfect garden, my mum is still digging cack out of the soil fifty years later.