How do I bathroom / kitchen / extension? etc.

That's extremely cool

My friends live in an early 1950s house. Built to house soldiers from a nearby military base. Made from all sorts of weird and wonderful materials due to post ww2 shortages. E.g. the Door frames and skirting are all metal due to wood shortages at the time.

Mates have a post war house that has filled concrete walls.

They were saying if they have to drill in the way they can hit all sorts. One time after destroying their 2nd drill bit they discovered they'd been drilling into a peice of glass.

All our door frames are steel! Builder wasn’t happy when he tried his nice chisel on them. Steel trusses in the loft too. This place was built in 1949 or 50.

Similar age then!
He left them unfinished for a while after stripling them to redecorate, ultimately proved a little too industrial looking.

It's a very solidly built house despite it being built with whatever was to hand at the time

There was all manner of innovation with metal in house building after the war. Some of the aluminium prefabs made by former aeroplane makers could have been the answer to house building costs and long construction times if they’d been developed further.

One of my pals lives in a cool post war house made of literal concrete Lego blocks with no mortar. It’s unmortgagble.

First level of pour this afternoon done. Managed to kill my drill before going down to our local hire place for a proper paddle mixer.

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Have to say find this mildly panic inducing!

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Why?

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Hard to see but what feels like half the house and a chimney is resting on those steels.

Making good progress though - back wall coming out on Monday and last of the steel work is going in. Just waiting for the 3 panel Maxlight rear sliding window but hoping to have windows in before Xmas

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https://www.instagram.com/p/ChXyB_zKo8k/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

Question for the group - we're in the process of replacing the kitchen, just pulled out the last of the old one & the below is how our mains water is coming into the house.

Do you think this is fine or does it look like a bodge by a previous owner (and so we should get someone out now to fix while there's no kitchen boxing it in)?

Just feels a bit like someone has roughly hewn through the concrete slab the house is built on so is probably not the original connection (there's a lot of dodgy DIY hidden through the house already).

Not helped by the constant hissing from the same pipe - Thames water think there's a leak (one engineer measured it to 1200 litres an hour!) in the main line outside but aren't doing anything about it as it's on a shared customer side connection.

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Looks original to me. I'd want a wide bore plastic incoming these days.

Floor poured and space age underlay has gone down. Feels warmer in there already, but the plaster drying means it’s like 98% humidity.

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How old is the house? What is the [lead-looking] pipe stub to the right of the water pipe? I am not qualified to have an opinion but I think it looks a) fine b) weird c) not original original, but old.

Looks dry (/no leaks) as far as I can see, is it?

@seager what underlay is that?

I think it’s a pretty ubiquitous gold 5mm underlay. Surprised how nonconductive it feels even on a concrete block and beam floor that is verrry cold.

It's a 60s house, built on the site of a row of Victorian terraced that they pulled down. I think the stub is an old waste pipe as that's where the original sink would have been.
No leaks inside, just the one outside somewhere.

Will probs just leave it, though will see what the builder thinks next week.

This is promising - I have some of the same coming in a week or so.

might be ‘solifloor gold’ i have it under my engineered wooden floor.

🙏

Have an Annual maintenance check…this is the crap that got pulled out of ours after a couple of years of use.

We don’t have a softener btw,

On the positive, that’s about 3kgs of limescale that we’ve not consumed in the past 2 years.

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Christ. That’s insane.

Obvs doubt ours looks anything like that. I guess neither of us is drinking limescale but only one of us is doing extra maintenance :-D

Been long time putting this off. Need to get our kitchen done, it’s small (2 bed flat) but needs completely ripping out and there’s quite a few quirky bits with pipes and electrics etc. It’s a 30s block with concrete walls and nothing is chased into the walls.

I’m terrible with this stuff so bear with me, but what’s the best way to approach this? Went in a place the other day with rough measurements and layout and they were happy to advise on design and finish etc, but without them coming to see it I don’t trust how they know what will work and what won’t fit because of plumbing and electrics etc.

Should I get a kitchen fitter in first to survey it all??

I guess my question is; how do I kitchen? Ideally I just want to deal with one person / company to do it all end to end.

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Wickes, John Lewis, etc will come out and measure up and advise on what fits. I think John Lewis may charge (but knock it off the kitchen price) but Wickes were free. My MIL got a Wickes bathroom and the process (excluding a load of covid related problems) was surprisingly ok.