How do I bathroom / kitchen / extension? etc.

It’s now fitted, with new vertical hardwood frames, AQ21 weather seals routed in, 4-point auto lock and auto drop-down bottom draught seal a-la dbr.

Nice, did you do all of this or outsource it?!

Good to know that argon-filled, toughened, warm edge spacer compatible fluted glass exists because there's meant to be a LOT in our front door, so I'll have to hit you up for supplier deets at some point.

V classy colour.

Thanks!

Deffo don’t have the time to do the actual work myself right now. I sourced all the parts (hardwood frame pieces. lock, ironmongery, Evva 4KS cylinder, draughtproofing, hinges, glazing etc), drew it all up and found a chippie to chop out the old frame, splice new pieces in, route the lock & keeps in and hang the door.

The weather strips are ‘Schlegel Q-Lon AQ21’, v good quality, and ubiquitously available, seals. Watch out for many fake replicas which quickly disintegrate. The real stuff isn’t expensive. It fits into a specially-sized rebated channel which needs to be routed into the door frame, using an expensive special router bit (anyone’s welcome to borrow mine), which makes retrofit difficult, but not impossible.

The bottom of the door has a Norseal NOR810 automatic drop-down seal that engages when the door is closed and retracts when opened. I actually bought two other types initially, both of which turned out to be shit designs which left big gaps for air to bypass the seals. The Norseal was the only one which actually sealed properly.

Yeah it took ages to nail down a source. After being given the runaround for weeks by about 10x online suppliers, I eventually got it via ‘Harlequin Glass’ on Lea Bridge Road.

They’re faahmlee run and round the corner from me, been in the game yonks so knew exactly where to get the units made up to my spec. Took 2 days to arrive.

Spec below.

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Osbourne Glass in SE25 will also do it

Yeah, I saw those drop down seals, they look to be a good solution, especially for wonky Victorian properties.
How thick are the double glazed units?

The glazing specs are all on the label in my last post; they’re ~24mm total thickness, which meant having to build out the rear of the door with beading to accommodate.

You can of course spec thinner glass and/or spacer, but then you lose thermal performance/security.

Yeah, makes sense. Just checked in my local glazing place (B & B Glaziers in Nunhead) and he reckoned it would be about £300 for a pair of panels with wooden trim. Does that seem reasonable!? I have no concept of what glazing should cost 😆

We paid ~£150 for the pair of glazed units (250x945mm each), and the wooden beading was a pittance from a builders merchant. So around half what you’ve been quoted.

Ha ok nice, looks like I'll be contacting your supplier instead then!

Strewth, that feels super cheap?! Good finding as ever.

How’s the bathroom screen?

That aubergine is very good.
I am always surprised how much I like dullish/beigish grey with light bricks. Seeing how much time you invest, see if there's a way to get some small samples/find leftovers in here and do some test panels?

Edit nvm

For the weather strips, how did you handle the areas where the locks and hinges are? Just made discontinuities in the seal or is there some clever solution?

Hinge side has a continuous strip; the routed channel just about clears the hinges.

Lock keep side: the keeps are too wide to accommodate a continuous strip, so these bits will have small pieces of the self-adhesive version of the same draught proofing product, to be applied after the door frame is painted.

does anyone have a hot tip for doors? i have this problem where our back door is 711mm wide which seems to be standard for internal doors only. the overall aperture means we can't widen even though there will be a new frame. Narrower is also out, its narrow enough as it is.

all the shops I find seem to be either quite punchy or disconcertingly cheap

Depends what kind of door you're after.

We have a tiny, very narrow non-standard door aperture into the small bog on the ground floor, and had to get a fully solid-core door blank and chop loads off the sides to make it fit.

Paving done (thanks to sloppy seconds from @dbr ), steels painted (badly, gone over the lines) in RAL3009 Oxide Red, and Pure White.

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Looks great!
What've you done with the alleyway at the side? Looks like it's a semi detached, so presumably you were able to walk through to the garden before? Door in anywhere or does it stop at the extension and it's storage rather than a route to anywhere now?

i guess one that looks nice and won't be too easy to kick in. Although it'll also get a catflap so maybe security concerns are moot vs a determined cat burglar. I'm not sure whether it matters that all my OTP options are 'internal'. Like, I can just paint it loads or something for weather proofing right?

Yeah, house is semi-detached with side access, but we extended to the boundary and put a small bog down one end of the side passage (door on the right in the pic), and left the rest of it as a covered bike storage area accessible via a door from the front of the house.

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i sort of considered building to the boundary when we did ours, but couldn't get my head around not having any external access to the back garden in case of needing to do any major work (such as building a shed or tree work)
do you have alternate access?

Nah, I weighed this up and decided that all that kind of shit can just get traipsed through the house when needed.

The side passage was a massive boon up until now, but I can live with putting floor protection down and cleaning up after messy works for the sake of loads of extra space and a ground floor bog.

Anyone got a good suggestion of brand for something like this, need a wall bath tap too. Brass gold brushed.
Seems options are super cheap or a million bucks.

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I've just bought basically that stuff from crosswater, but not sure if that ticks the cheap enough box....