Owning your own home

There's plants that shouldn't be planted in the first place, and then never let to get taller than maybe 2 m. That was one of those.

Do you have kids? Make a (dead) tree house, save money?

Obvs depends on the type of building but if it’s a new purpose built apartment block in the UK it almost certainly has concrete floors. I’d be more worried about putting pressure on a single skin of plasterboard ceiling that probably has void behind it.

I have kids, but no time or talent sadly.

It was a leyland cypress. Our neighbours behind are absolutely delighted. And hopefully the company that built their house will plant a couple of reasonably well-established trees in the gap between our fences as they have the rest of the way along.

(Apparently they offered to cut down the tree before building the houses, and our house's previous owner said yes and then changed her mind. Could have saved us a couple of grand).

☹️

https://auctions.savills.co.uk/auctions/1-september-2023-130/25-elsdale-street-hackney-london-e9-6qy-7272

it’s a apartment building constructed 5 years back if that helps.

Solid

It wasn't one of the good ones.

Birds didn't seem to like it anyway.

Shame that stuff makes such shit firewood. Could have kept you warm all winter...

Shit firewood, acidic chippings, wood that's no good for building things out of...

Waste of space tree.

Okay nice one. I know the ceiling is 15mm gyproc plasterboard, we’ll see what they say but their faq says as long as the floor is solid it’s fine

Absolute bargain really if it goes for anywhere near that figure. A developer is going to make a lot of money there punting out luxury flats.

Seems like the right thread to get advice. Neighbour a few door down seems to be running an unregistered childcare operation (2-3 kids per day, for the whole day) plus is starting to expand his property’s volume with the cheeky addition of massive garden storage boxes (1200l plastic ones). 2 first floor over kitchen extension and a new 1 over their garden shed. It wasn’t a particularly picturesque view but the increased noise and visual clutter are starting to get to me.

Worth reporting? Is there even regulation that would apply? Or am I the bastard and need to breathe and enjoy the results of the neighbours’ enterprising spirit?

E10 so WF council. Apologies for the crosspost from “bastard neighbours”. Seeing this new addition early morning made me go a bit bananas

Stop looking in to other people's gardens

Unlicensed childcare: report
Storage boxes: surely better than whatever is in them being strewn around?

Hardly ruining the view are they

Has anyone had any joy getting Openreach to remove a disused copper telephone cable?

I have no need for it and it's going to get in the way when we do work on the front of our house so it will need moving at some point anyway.

After lying to their extremely frustrating automated telephone triage service, which basically said contact your ISP (I don't have one for that line, it's disused!) I managed to speak to a real person who said I have to email them a photo and some info including why I want it moved. I suspect this may result in getting charged.

However, if it was to suddenly blow down in a freak storm I could call them to report damaged infrastructure, then explain it was disused and that they don't need to bother reinstalling it when they come to fix it...

You've fairly recently moved too right... the cable has never been connected since you've been there

Yep but we did have Plusnet through it until the end of August last year.

I could ask them I suppose, but I don't see why they'd presumably pay Openreach to do it.

The wider situation is a bit ridiculous really, BT is busy bullying the old and vulnerable away from land lines* to hit the end of 2025 deadline for the copper switch off but I haven't heard anything about plans to remove all the old lines, presumably because it will cost too much.

*https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001q0t5

We have a few old cables on the front of the house too. I don't know which ones might be functioning. I no longer have a landline or TV but don't really want to cut them off in case someone wants to use them in future. Are we not supposed to do it ourselves?
I think I know which one went to the old satellite dish. Can I just cut that one off?

PSTN switch off might happen by the end of 2025, although I'm skeptical, but that's not the same as copper switch off which is going to take a lot longer. Exchange switch off is expected to be a 4-7 year process and they have only started 5 so far.

Theoretically the copper in the BT network is worth about £1.4 billion as scrap. If you can get it in to the scrap man.

Are we not supposed to do it ourselves?

'BT line' south of master socket (not my problematic language!), plus the socket itself, belongs to Openreach and isn't meant to be fiddled with by anyone else.

Satellite dish I imagine yes, although if it belonged to the supplier perhaps officially not. It's not going to affect anything else though, whereas my old phone line is attached to the telegraph pole and may still be live (if not high voltage). Plus if you just cut it free without checking the coast is clear you could have someone's eye out...

They'll perhaps offer it on a tender if anyone can be arsed to remove it, but I've read there's not much copper in those cables and even if that did happen I suspect I'd have long finished refurbishing our place by then.

Hopefully.

They are planning to do it

BT recently stated that it remained “confident” of being able to “recover” an estimated 200,000 tonnes of copper from their old legacy network through the 2030s.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2023/06/openreach-to-extract-200-tonnes-of-uk-copper-cable-in-2023.html

Maybe someone might steal the parts of the cable that are in the way? It's not very protected from theft, is it?

I had a dysfunctional copper line badly attached to the front of my house, some of which is no longer there but I have no idea what happened to it...

Oh good, well that's something, although I definitely can't wait until the 2030s!

All of this is based on the assumption I won't need that line again, we can get BT fibre run from the poles on our street now, I'm with Community Fibre, there's Virgin (not that I'll ever use it) and Hyperoptic are coming so I'm presuming my thinking isn't flawed.