Home DIY

I routinely tape the walls around windows these days. Aside from the cost of the tape I've had much better results. There are some issues with tape but the alternative takes so much longer and you can still have problems getting it to look properly edged.

I have done both for many years though and cutting in without tape used to be a delight with a trade oil based eggshell on top of a really thick oil based undercoat. I do miss some aspects of those days.

Yeah.

It’s nuts how cheap they are. The uprights and brackets were £38 from Ironmongery Direct and the board was £28 from Travis Perkins.

Looked at the prices of shite shelves from the Internet high street and they were all minimum £75 a shelf!!

V good.

Those look like my (now very fucked) windows. Except not fucked. Mine will be skip bound 2 weeks from tomorrow.

Ha, no kink shaming in this house!

Currently convincing ms_com this is the way to go for either side of the monster fireplace of horrors.

kink shaming

Agreed, what did Ray or Dave ever do wrong?

UK Jive

Does anyone know where I might be able to find some 20mm melamine ply around Leyton way? Bit late to the party with lockdown desk building

There are some issues with tape but the alternative takes so much longer and you can still have problems getting it to look properly edged

I taped (ScotchBlue). Am very pleased with the edge but also discovered the issues.

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Simple paint job today - repaint bathroom.

Remove shelf and half the current paint comes off with it. Sigh.

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I need some shelves in my kitchen and am pondering brackets. It's a couple to go above this work surface here. Was initially planning on floating shelves but concerned they may be a bit thick (and possibly not strong enough, it will be going in to somewhat crumbly brick). Also struggling to find anywhere that sells custom sized, painted floating shelves so I'd have to do them myself.

Any suggestions for other brackets? Ideally want something unobtrusive but they will be reasonably large shelves (130cm x 25cm) with kitchen stuff on them so need to also be fairly strong. Cheers

We used these in a similar situation. Floating wouldn't have been strong enough.

https://www.sdslondon.co.uk/mital-shelf-brackets/wood-shelf-bracket-140-x-190-mm.html

Floating can be fine as long as you make sure the brackets are well packed in the shelves (often they arrive a bit sloppy) and use proper long screws into the wall- perhaps even with some resin as the brick is so crumbly. I just used IKEA Lack in my kitchen and they’re holding up well three years later

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Anyone seem any good impact driver deals on at the moment?

Cutwrights will cut you floating shelves from any of their laminates, birch ply or MDF (up to 35mm off the top of my head) they can also edge band the MDF with preparation tape (so the fibres don't show through), prime and drill the holes for you as well.

These are the strongest floating shelf brackets I've found. They come in different depths.

Currently replacing skirting board and found these areas of detached plaster by the front door.

What’s the best way to repair before the new skirting can be attached?

There’s also a noticeable draught coming through that I’d like to stop as well.

Expanding foam in the cavity to stop the draught followed by layers of filler?

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I'm just quoting a reply from @Airhead from before which was about chased channels from rewire

It's not that difficult but you need smallish amounts of a few materials that come in larger quantities.

Hopefully your wiring is in some form of trunking possibly plastic, pinned into place so that it's easy to plaster over.

PVA the channel, mix up some bonding plaster (not multi finish), slap that in and roughly level it off, best if its a little below the surface but just less than proud is best.

Let the bonding plaster dry, 24hrs should do it if the central heating is working. Wash the bonding off the walls surrounding the channel with a sponge. Should now be clean walls.

Use some TX110 from toupret or similar if you have another filler you prefer. Fill the channel to flush. If you want a slight texture to match surrounding walls then get creative with a sponge. Let it dry a bit then sponge of any excess.

Paint with Gardz from Zinsser. Let that dry and finish with emulsion.

So you need pva, plastic trunking and some nails, bonding plaster, decorators filler & gardz

There's a ebay 15% off code (purchase15) at BuyAParcel and FFX tool shops atm, so worth checking on there. Thou always check google prices first as FFX (especially) seem to raise their ebay price during the offers.

I did actually see that -are they legit sellers? I saw a very cheap Makita impact driver on there with a weird colour which raised alarm bells about authenticity!

Yeh I think they are. FFX is a folkstone based tool shop (bought a Makita vacuum a few weeks ago from them). And I feel like i've defo used BuyAParcel before.

I ordered a Makita 5ah batt on the deal from BuyAParcel for £60.77. Cheapest I can find atm.

I've shopped from both, especially FFX a fair few times. They do inflate the prices for these offers though so it's possible you won't actually be saving anything vs the norm.

FFX are rapid with their delivery.

Ok then time to pull trigger on plunge saw. I think I could spend on a Festool TS55 or Mafell MT55CC as we have a lot to get through.

I saw the video posted a few days ago I'm not tied to spending the money. Top priority is one which is easy to get good accuracy and lowest priority is dust collection as we are only one step away from a building site.

Opinions?

Fwiw: I use a Makita DTD152Z daily and I have nothing bad to say about it. I think I usually pay around £50 for them. They do some horrible special edition colours at times: Purple, white, black etc.