Home DIY

Take some pictures. Print them out and stick them in a container and shove it under the floorboards for the next person to discover

The house I'm sat in now had building work, septic tank plus other stuff done without planning permission. Our solicitors got the sellers to take out insurance in perpetuity to pay for any future grief.

We wanted the house aka money pit as it has the garden we wanted....

Thanks @nef and @Airhead!

Rightly so.
Mate has a monster house from early C19th, and partner wanted a more open plan kitchen. For years everyone told them it couldn't be done, then someone somewhere suggested this company that could take out the wall and install a steel instead.
I know this house, and I know this wall, its 4' thick or more, right in centre of house on ground floor, literally THE most central, heaviest, chunkiest wall in the whole place with 2 further full floors on top of it, and 1st swing of staircase joists on the corner of it. Not something to mess with.

Yup, got this magical company in to do it. And they've been living in a house that very closely resembles the game of pick up sticks ever since. Full internal and external bracing to hold onto what hasn't already moved drastically, become a bit of a legal battle, but ultimately the poor house is screwed.

In your situation I would speak to a structural engineer before any builders.

At the end of the day the specifying of any steels should be done by an engineer and will be covered by their professional indemnity insurance.

this wall, its 4' thick or more

Is it a castle?!

Thanks, will most likely go this route as saving money is nice but not being crushed by a collapsing house is even nicer.

As the wall was knocked down so long ago and wasn't flagged when we moved in 12 months ago, I have a feeling we could get away with it. I can't see how anybody could prove it wasn't originally squared instead of being an arch. Interestingly the builder noticed the bricks nearer the door are in worse condition compared to the side against the party wall. He speculated this was from banging doors which is slightly worrying and reinforces getting a structural engineer's opinion.

No just a big old house.

We used to live in a farmhouse thats ground floor rooms dated from approx 1560, many additions and changes, mostly in 1750-1800 region. Ground floor walls were jumbo. Back then they used to use the BIG ASS ROCK foundation method*

*Find biggest rock possible to move with a team of humans and horses. Drag big ass rock until next to other big ass rocks in a sort of box shape. Leave big ass rocks to sink into ground over a season or two. Then start building a house on top of them. Kinda funny that Machu Pichu is less old than our crusty old farmhouse was. Don't live there anymore, spend 7 years on that pile and never got finished, endless work and then the neighbouring two farms both sold out to developers so ended up surrounded on nearly 3 sides by tiny box houses right against boundary with constant tiny box house assholes being assholes. Now live in a moderately dense area of city and its honestly the quietest place I've ever lived.

Plenty of the walls in our house are about a metre deep, old farmhouse built in the early 1800s.

Presumably that's where they hid the bodies?

Electrical question:

Installation of a CISA lock on a shared door. It's to replace an existing Yale. The CISA lock uses electricity.

Does this require a minor works certificate? (In Scotland, if that changes things)

It's not unusual work for the contractor but I want to be sure everything is done by the book so paperwork is available if/when I sell my flat in the future.

Now live in a moderately dense area of city and its honestly the quietest place I've ever lived

I've had this experience too - in (some) cities people seem to be quiet (ish) and considerate. Doesn't get too noisy because everyone knows everyone else can hear them.

I've also had the opposite experience to be fair :)

They're structural.

http://www.moidart.org.uk/justoutside/horseinviaduct/horseinviaduct.htm

I feel bad for the horse.

Genuinely wouldn't surprise me...

Scotland does have different rules in part. However in England a minor works certificate should be issued even for a lamp change. This doesn't happen in the wild. If you can find an electrician willing to charge you for the time and effort to do the paperwork that's great.

New update from hell:

Sparx was in today for the first time. After a couple of hours he came to find me looking as white as a sheet. Unsurprisingly the whole house needs re-wiring. Everything is labelled in polish (even the switches on consumer unit) in illegible hand-writing. There are no RCDs in the consumer unit. There are about 30 times more junction boxes than needed and they are randomly dotted around the house each junction box is crammed with wagos. Perhaps the biggest surprise the sparx found though was that every time a cable terminated the last 4 inches of each wire was stripped and coloured sleeves were added; red to neutral, black to live and solid green to earth.

The Sparx is of the opinion that whoever did the wiring was actively trying to kill someone.

Oh and the landscape gardeners took one look at the roof and ran. As did the three other roofing firms that subsequently turned up to quote for the job. Not sure how to proceed with that one.

Cheers, spoke to the contractor and he says it's never done under a minor works cert as it takes low voltage power from an existing installation, or something to that effect.

At what point do you tell them just to knock it all down and start again.

Terrifying though. How does this happen?

How's the plumbing/gas 💣💥

When starting out and getting quotes for the work the owner decided that he wanted a "turnkey" fixed price contract. He invited firms to bid for the job and went for the cheapest option, he's told me how much he was quoted and it was laughable, the figure was at least £80k short of what it should have been so it is obvious that the firm didn't have the experience to bid for that job properly. Inevitably the guy ran out of money and the job wasn't done so he was fired. Unfortunately when looking for someone to finish off the work the owner made the same mistake again so he had cowboys trying to put right work that had already gone pear shaped.

I actually don't think that either of the firms set out to rip him off and that in both instances took on work that they massively under priced so started cutting corners to minimise their losses.

It also doesn't help that the owner is in denial about how much he's fucked up and is understandably upset at having pissed so much (borrowed) money up the wall. He's currently around £65k over what I think would have been a decent price for the work in the first place.

As far as we can tell not too bad. The gas has been certified as safe and the heating / hot water all works even if some of the locations of isolation valves are slightly idiosyncratic.

Shed electrics. The long term plan is to have a proper connection to one of the spare circuits on the main CU with its own RCD etc. But that won't be until the kitchen is redone so a cable can be run out.

Until then, how mad would it be to wire up the shed with its own CU and just run an extension lead out to it from the external 13A socket that's on the kitchen circuit (30A, recently sorted out when we had an EICR about 6 months ago)? Most it's even likely to see used is a light and the odd power tool plus a Henry hoover.

Have recently had not far off that experience with a family house. Some of the work that had been done in the last 20 years was OK, some not ideal but not dangerous. Then we got into the older stuff installed through 80-90's by various men with van types. Truley mind bendingly bad. Like they must been on a laugh on just how badly they could install something and still get paid for it.
My personal fav is always securing a T+E cable to any object by just screwing through the centre of it, nailing the earth to the object, and precision stripping both the conductors insulation just so that it won't be shorting right now. But once someone else comes along and unscrews something inside the floor they get a nice shock (screws that were put in at the time, not subsequent blind screwing into floors, i.e. deliberate).

Not mad at all I reckon, I may or may not have had a very similar set up for 18 months now. It just powers LED strips for light and occasionally a power tool or battery charger. Proper connection will happen though. Disclaimer - I am not an electrician.