Home DIY

I have decided I am gonna replace the tap. Thanks for egging me on ;-)

£50 quid on the appropriate tools and a replacement tap, and hopefully it'll all be fixed by the middle of next week!

It's a really lovely place, and I feel bad resenting the situation because I realise I am very privileged to be able to own a property at all. The previous owners were clearly nuts, though. They've just splurged on some really non-essential weird stuff, and ignored some of the basics.

For example they have an electronic aqualisa bath and shower system in the main bathroom which includes remote controls so you can turn them on and off remotely. Why anyone would want that, I've no idea. They've also got a smart thermostat, and things like fancy bifold doors and a huge skylight. All of this we know they put in while they owned the place.

On the other hand, 3 of the 3 toilet seats are absolutely hanging off their hinges, one was genuinely unusable. When I came to replace I realised they had tried to refix one of them with "no more nails" or similar and rounded the screws for the fixings. This made removal of the fixings a real bitch of a job. One of the radiators was hanging off the wall when I moved in, and on removal it is clear this has happened 4 times previously. Each time they've tried to bodge it back on with "no more nails" rather than just use the correct fixing types for a radiator into plasterboard. They had a loft conversion done in 2017, but haven't insulated between the remaining loft void and the living space so it is always freezing.

Ugh ... I am gonna really enjoy a good sit down and rest once a couple of final bits are done. Every spare waking hour for the last 2 weeks have been taken up by finding and fixing new shit.

lol, I sympathise. If it helps, the day we moved in an electrician we know said he’d just do a quick check that all was ok before the removals guys turned up. We spoke to him later that day and he said he’d spent six hours replacing or removing everything that was likely to kill someone. The previous owner loved a bit of diy, especially if it involved the electrics. We still don’t use the electric shower in the main bathroom out of fear.

Oh dear lord ... I'm almost scared to get an electrician round in case the whole thing is a write off. To be fair I think the previous owners just didn't really do any DIY and their handyman was a bodger. I'll take that over what you've described!

It begins

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What's the load here? You wouldn't normally spread the weight of a floor on to hangers that are attached to masonary. The bolts/single brick become the weak point (shear strength risk). You'd normally use a masonry hanger that was folded on top of the masonry itself so the load could be spread effectively, or you'd knock into the wall directly and use longer joists.

Or is this just to support something casual?

I was an awful neighbour today... lots of drilling to be able to attach a crank frame to padstones.

Winter-use resin goes off stupidly fast (2 minutes), had to re-drill one of the bolts and managed to glue the steel to the padstones twice!

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You'll have to get them involved if they complain - nothing but impressive

It’s just the garage roof.

I couldn’t use masonry hangers as no acces to the top of the brick. This is the best of an annoying situation

Nice! What are you up to with the cranked steels?

Cutting the ceiling joists in a bathroom to vault the ceiling. Madness probably, but we have a vision?!

Blimey! Up for sharing drawings/vision? Sounds wild.

It's for this bathroom. 175mm insulation to roof. 125mm insulation to external walls. Roll top bath to rear-right. Basins to front-right. Airing cupboard to rear-left, toilet mid-left and shower front-left (tiled) with half height wall divider. Probably wood running up the back wall and towards you across the ceiling as I like the idea of all the wood angles at the hip-end of the roof.

I've already had to fix the roof a little as it's moving towards the gable end and used to leak. It also creaks badly in high wind... not ideal!

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Had to double-check the thread title.

Impressive diy! Sounds amazing.

Very cool! Please keep us updated.

Phone picture effect, or are the side walls leaning in?

Finally got time to finish the kitchen extraction today. Whilst nothing went horribly wrong it was the ball ache I was anticipating.

Now it's 150mm metal ducting from the top of the kitchen extractor all the way to outside. It's made a world of difference to reducing the noise of the cooker hood and it actually does what it was designed to now!

Hardest bit was getting the position of the hole in the fascia in the right place. Despite removing all plastic head nails I couldn't get it off - I think it was secured right at the top too, under the roof and I wasn't prepared to go that far to get it off. Removing the nails gave me enough play to see behind it with my phone camera and then mark up where to drill the hole.

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Just bad photography, but nothing's square in the house... results in lots of head scratching when fitting things.

our house has been similar and amusingly the previous tenants chose the exact same style tap. there's definitely some correlation there I think.

Getting very confused trying to settle on what to do about about 35 halogen (MR16 - the ones with two thin pins) downlighters needing changed to LEDs.

I've changed almost all of the bulbs already but several of them started flickering which resulted in my removing them. Weirdly it only seems to happen to about a third of them about a third of the time but i'me fed up with the issue and want it sorted.

Googleresearch tells me that its due to the (magnetic) transformers between the 240v AC mains cables and the 12v fitting , which have a minimum rating of 20w. So a 3-5w LED isn't enough load which causes the transformer to continually cut out and re-start which causes flicker.

Solutions seem to be, replace all of the transformers with suitably rated LED drivers, which involves disconecting wires either side of the transforer and wiring a new one, or replace the whole fittings with ones with pre-wired driver. This might halve the amount of wiring work as i'd only have to disconnect the mains connection and rewire the new one which is attractive when there's so many to do. The price for either of these solutions looks to be similar at around £8 per light. It's a chunk of money either way.

All of which seems like a massive ballache and considerable expense. All i really need is an efficient LED bulb that (somehow?) shows the transformer more than a 20w load? Am I missing anything obvious here? Does such a thing exist?

Are they on dimmer swithes?

I got rid of all our MR16s and replaced with GU10 LEDs. Needed faffing around with changing wiring a bit, but was easy enough.

Then it was just a matter of matching the right bulbs to the right dimmer switch - they don't all play nicely.

You can buy resistors to wire in, but that's a faff in itself.

Thanks man.

Yep. Big faff. No dimmers. Reckon i should just target the ones that flicker for changing the tranformer to the properaly rated LED driver rather than stumping up for all of them?

I had a perplexingly issue with changing a light bulb, after working myself up, I got to the conclusion that replacing the whole shebang (housing transformer ect) at £10a go would be the best rational way forward ... [or possibly an adapter at ~£7 a go]... However I made it to such a thing - that I really couldn't be arsed/cope with that the lovely mrs blue just popped to Robert dyer's and just bought a bulb that fitted and worked - I could not for the life of me, had seen that as possible

Change all of them. The halogen drivers will either die, or kill the LED bulbs in the end.

You can either:

• replace the driver and connection on the housing with GU10 and buy new 240v GU10 LED bulbs, or
  
• replace the driver with an LED driver and continue to use your two prong LEDs.
  
  

I went for the latter as I had a bunch of two prong LEDs. Went for the cheap inline drivers from Amazon, they seem to work OK.

No. We had this in the kitchen in our old place. GU10 tails is the answer eventually. No point changing for LED MR16 tails, less bulb choice, same cost.