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Should have been £79.95 so I'd say so! A weird chain of events...I recommended the Aldi welder to the BiL. Under their referral reward system he gets £10 off of his first order over £45 if I email him. So he got his for £59.95. I then got an unexpected £10 voucher. I figured it'd be the same thing as in you'd have to spend £90 to use two vouchers. I posted the Aldi link on the car and welding forums and loads of people asked me to email them so they could buy the welder at £10 off. When I read the small print in the T&Cs it said referral rewards are accumulative. Anyway you can ONLY get up to £1500 in referral rewards! So...I used 5 referral rewards and got £50 off. Since then I've a few more so that'll but some air tools. Result I think is the word!

Good days work today. Granite dry fitted. Turns out it's not to bad to work with. Just used a 4.5'' grinder with a diamond blade and a plant sprayer to keep it wet.

Yes I have rusty hinges on my barn doors no wind will blow them shut.

Karma with a dash of serendipity I call it! Just to show I'm not biased: https://www.screwfix.com/p/pro-grabit-screw-bolt-remover-set-2-piece-set/2951v EDIT: £90 and counting!

That's what we did in the end: never mind a jemmy ..... two 'king great big crow bars ....

Toolstation 6mm £16.22 inc vat for 220m = 7.4p/m Free next day delivery as order over £10. 10mm works out at about 18p/m delivered.

I can't recall exactly what I wrote, but I think it was just that 6mm polyprop was so cheap that I just bought a 220m reel from the local BM for around £20. That's been more than enough for all our duct draw ropes, plus the safety rope on our borehole pump, with the odd bit left over.

Or to think of it another way, every one of us here has already placed a much bigger bet on ourselves to build a house than whether we can cut a 300quid bit of stone. :-)

The hardest issue is moving it as it had the sink and hob cut outs in it. We basically ratchet strapped it to some big timber as a frame and moved it with a couple of blokes in my 70's vee dub camper.. in terms of bricking it, new it cost 3-4K secondhand I gave £300 for it. Had a practice on some spare upstand and just went for it. He who dares rodders! He who dares!

Its pretty easy to cut, horribly messy but easy. I taped it up with masking tape, then wetted it with a plant skoosher and ran a cut along with the grinder by hand, then filled the cut with water and went progressively deeper. Naturally at the corners you cannot join the cuts all the way down. So I made sure they were connected at the top and as deep as possible we'll supported the bits I wanted to keep then gently knocked the remainder out. Quick wazz round with the grinder to tidy up after.

The lights are an invention born of necessity. This being an ikea kitchen and the granite having been from something else means it's about 40mm shy of the wall. Hence the build of a light bar with 30mm rod and the upstand... The oak detail covers a multitude of sins. If the cuts had gone badly I would have put it round those edges and just chiselled the oak to fit the granite.

F what are you doing sitting on top of a sink? Use the shower like the rest of us.

I'd have been cacking myself cutting that! So do you drill (core?) holes in the corners & cut to them? Thinking sharp internal corners and stress points etc.

Looking good. Having the upstand does give some forgiveness but you still have balls of steel my man! Like the mash-up with the lights, and I may well steal the oak decor end idea too, of course pretending that it was my idea

If the council apply a community infrastructure levy or CIL charge to your approval then as a self builder you can claim exemption. The key is not starting anything on the build until the paperwork process has fully completed.

Must confess, my (our) hearts are in our mouths at the minute. And the real irony is that for a few years, I gave lectures to 200 students at a time on Resilience in the Professional Context ! Ha! Good deal of careful thinking and discussion due this weekend.........

That probably describes me except I think I am a lot more positive. Nothing gives me more joy in life than helping people. You can't take it with you and we're all going to die eventually. Once you accept those things there's a lot less to worry about. I notice a lot of the guys on here seem to be retired and have a lot of time to help people out, I am sure they really enjoy it. The media has a lot to answer for, they seem to have taken the view that misery sells and scaring people gets clicks. Politics has also taken the same tack, scaring people into voting for you. I wish someone would come out with a positive upbeat view of the future. In fact I will. Despite what people say and the move to measure everything relative to what everyone else has.. People have never been richer, had a higher standard of living, lived longer or had more opportunities than they have today. Perhaps someone needs to point that out.

My parents in law have a number of wealthy friends - sold their businesses for £10-30 million type of well-off (after years of raking in hundreds of thousands of quid per annum from these businesses). All are retired with huge houses, expensive cars every couple of years, large holiday houses in France, trips all over the world. Yet to a person, all they seem to care about is foreigners, benefits cheats, regulations inconveniencing them ("health and safety gone mad!") and the amount of tax the government "steals" from them. I have a lot of difficulty sitting in the same room hearing them talk about how hard they worked to get where they are, as if every poor person just needed to a work a bit harder to get everything they've had. Oh, and it seems they all read the Daily Wail! I think the problem is that selfishness makes you unhappy. All the research shows that true happiness comes from giving, not getting. If these people spent a bit less time (and money) trying to fill the voids in their own lives with "stuff", and a bit more time trying to make the lives of others better, I'm sure they'd be happier. Not really a conversation you can have with them of course!

It's a very important point and one we've experienced now we're in the final furlong. We were really struggling to make head way on paint. We popped into Farrow and Ball on Great Western Road purely by chance and walked out £195 lighter having paid for a 'ColourConsultation',something you'd never catch me doing. What sold it? When he said 'It might not be for everyone but could save your marriage'. I looked at my other half and we both laughed - and we signed up. It was money well spent. It's much much easier to agree when you have someone knowledgeable who can address the technical side of the debate confidently - like 'no, that grey is the wrong base tone for that blue' - we don't argue, just accept and carry on. We have the full house planned now after a 1hr 30mins session. We're not sure about two but the good thing is,we got there quicker and never fell out. Tiles were tricky as we did that ourselves - round in many circles!

Self builders never retire - they just find different ways of being busy.