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This is really just one idea out of many possibles but may shed some light, when the first and second part of the building were built foundations as we know them today didn't really exist, they used corbelled brick foundations which are basically wide brick walls laid directly into a prepared trench. Many many 100,000 of buildings and structures, millions in fact stand across the UK like this, have done for a century an will do for another with basic maintenance and care. Sometimes due to lack of a unified foundation individual areas of the building can settle and move, it is possible that at some point someone even removed these lower bricks not understanding what they were - "oh there is a row of bricks, they are in my way" they are removed and all seems fine, fast forward a few decades and another course of two drops and gives you this "floating" column. It could also just have slipped - the fact is the bricks went somewhere, it was not built like that, it only stands because it is tied into the other walls. If it was me I think I would dig a local pit around this column, investigate the makeup and then place a proper foundation around it all and make up to the underside of the column. What I would want to achieve by exposing more down below is how the column and the wall behind it all ties in together and make certain that it is going to stand for another 100 years without any issues.

Ever since we moved in we have always been asked "is it two bungalows or one?" Weirdly it was designed exactly like the main picture (which was the start of our build as they were doing the footings). I think it was all a bit of a ploy. Roll back to early 70s when it was some sort of large vegetable patch. Planning permission was refused for two bungalows, various amendments and someone designed the bungalow as it is today, one bungalow suspiciously looking like two bungalows separated by a flat roof. I think they planned to build it and then attempt to get it split into two bungalows but it never happened. We have always wanted to somehow 'connect' up the roof and to be honest it's all been a bit vague on how this would be achieved. Mid build architect and builder got together, another £200 for some more beam calcs and over yesterday and today it is all looking a bit more like one bungalow. This pic is from the scaffolding and you can finally see the roof joining with the large flat roof extension. From the canal/bridge it now looks far more connected though this pic doesn't do it much justice (yesterday). And from the garden looking into our kitchen: What we really like is our ensuite, which, in the absence of any external walls will have a nice fixed rooflight on the flat roof just above our toilet/sink vanity unit which will be slightly raised from the ceiling (not the best pic).

There's probably a detailed post of Jeremy's blog somewhere about his in roof solar. Home page: http://www.mayfly.eu/ F

Still plan to use REC or LG rather than switch to a more value brand. The REC n-power 315W represents a good quality/value IMO at £150 retail for leading brand all-back panel and comes with 25yr product/performance/labour warranty if you get it installed by an approved supplier. You obvisiouy get cheaper 315W panels though...

So that's about £4K total in parts including the in roof mounting kit. How much will you save by not having to tile the majority of that face of the roof? Installation wise your electrician and the roofer should be able to fit that lot without difficulty.

Only just thought but imo it's handy to get those 4 tiles behind the WC flat as that's where the pan will sit against. Mine wasn't perfect: The blue shims are 3mm. A definite rock on the level! When you put your pan on the wall do so with copious clear CT1 then walk away for 36 hours and don't touch. So said @Nickfromwales. All I can say is I'm sitting on mine as I type this and it's rock solid.

When you're lying passed out on the bog floor and come round you'll look up and see how rough yours looks!

I've used it for tile adhesive, SLC, brick laying mortar etc I'd sell the missus before I got rid of this piece of kit.

@canalsiderenovation that quote structure looks similar to how midsummer wholesale structure their stuff - check out their site and you'll get a flavour for pricing. They have a link to an app on their site which spits out the material quantities for you based on your roof size. Very easy to use. Easy to get a 'trade' login with them too for slightly better pricing.

Pizza boxes make excellent tile templates.

Yes that looks fine. I have been caught out by too big a gap left by the tilers and had to get MagicMan to do their thing.

Just thinking how superb mine would have been had I cheated and used a tile levelling system. I needn't have had a dimmer switch & lairy blind then... ?

No plan was all inline I.e vertical grout lines top to bottom . Regarding around flush etc. my plan was just a square cut out to surround them all

Wusses! Cut a proper circle: ?

No, it's a c***. If you want to cut curves in tiles then the carbide grit edged jigsaw blades from TS are good and cheap as chips. A set of diamond tile files are great for taking sharp edges down. I see you're using a levelling kit, which one? Wish I had!

That is almost 3.5 kW of power on permanent (assuming your kw is really kWh). Do a meter reading tonight at 8 PM, and another at 8AM, then another one at 8PM. Post up the numbers as something does not seem right.

Drill and plug or drill and use expanding anchors for fixing into ceilings. Ducting can/will vibrate as air flows through it and the last thing you want is nails working loose and coming free. Plus precast slabs can be incredible difficult to fire nails into.

The most important cut on these wall hung WCs is the one above the flush pipe, which must be close to the pipe or it will be visible after the loo is mounted. The rest you can just go round with straight cuts or l-shaped as you have done. If you have a loo you could do a template around it and offer it up. And yes, you can turn the tile over and do the last bit from the other side.

Yeah - I went for Raid 10 across 4 drives mostly because my NAS is on Linux and I'm using btrfs which I love, but I don't fully trust its RAID 5 support (and probably never will as it looks like the winds are blowing towards zfs these days). Also I had some bad experience with Raid 5 on my old Infrant ReadyNAS that got slower over time but was a real pickle to convert back from. With the 1019+ my inclination would be same -- even start out with 4 or even three drives in Raid 5, put the NVR on it too, see how that goes and consider how to use the remaining 2 bays as space and speed demands evolve. I'll watch how you get on with interest! I'm sure 8GB RAM is plenty, but having seen the table above the lack of future expansion on this is the only hesitation I'd now have on it. (Full disclosure, I installed Home assistant on a Virtual Box VM (on ubuntu) yesterday , as they're deprecating the docker install I was using, and while it runs absolutely fine the act of carving out 2GB dedicated to the VM did make me twinge rather). Well... roll on a couple months (and a few surprise tangents in the conversation here : ) and I'm thinking about this topic again. Bizarrely because I decided to sell all my current AV and Sonos stuff and start over in the new house, and LMS (nee Squeezeserver) seems to be the winner, which is hilarious as this is what I used 15 years ago for multi room audio and it looks like I've gone full circle! It was a joy to unpack my old gen2 SqueezeBox and setup again, I bought it in 2006 and still supports every useful file format, and and now even Spotify streams to it great. (Alongside Sonos, it's the only system to let you mix and match local and spotify media. Even use local playlists as input to have spotify suggest variations) Anyway point here is I had to go through the motions on reinstalling software stacks few time, and tried out proxmox.com for managing VMs which I found really nice, along with portainer.io to manage docker containers. So I think this is the path for me rather than a proprietary NAS solution. But the i7 machine I put it on keeps burning out SSD drives so it will soon be time to get a proper server to host it all on. I'm looking at these 16-core Atom machines, may even enough to host my BlueIris Win10 VM too, TBC https://www.broadberry.co.uk/intel-atom-rackmount-servers/cyberserve-atom-104s Nice thing with that vs Xeon is it's very low energy draw when idle, and can spin up more cores as needed. (And it's several k£ cheaper)

10cm is not narrow, 2-3cm is narrow.

If the sheets are new why would you suspect rot? Ply is not likely to have the same issues that normal timber will see, but that is not the rule, ply is mostly damaged, with enough exposure, from water damage and starts to peel/flake. So unless there are these signs I would not worry. If you are very concerned I would treat the original timbers with some of that Dulux Trade wood preservative which also stops little beasties, wood worm etc. However, in all honesty, I'd just inspect it and check it all seems fine. Construction timber often gets wet and isn't usually a cause for concern, up here I see OSB and ply decks on builds sitting with what can only be described as swimming pools on them for months on end and are all OK.

Just got a pair of Securistyle hinges from here for £11 Inc postage. Seem really efficient and nice to deal with: https://upvcspares4repairs.co.uk/

thanks, feels like ime giving up a bit, but we at that stage where we just don't have the luxury of doing anything but the quickest and cheapest way to get hot water and some form of heating, then we can hunker down and spend a couple of 3 months recovering funds before getting on with the inside stuff

That is different - you don’t want to be applying heat under cupboards where food may be stored, or making fridges or freezers work harder. This sounds like a fairly open flexible space so just install the heating up to the most suitable point in the room - with the heat mats you’ll probably need to look at the best layout for a 10m mat which may leave out around 100mm from each side which isn’t an issue.

Cracking crops up on a petty regular basis and it can cause concern to say the least when it's your home. It is a pretty complex subject but here is an attempt at a lightheated over view of some of the in's and outs. I have caveated some stuff here and there. Looking at the photo (in insolation) that Bri44 posted the crack is relatively small in nature. If you can stick your finger in a crack then you should take action and seek advice. If you notice the crack is getting slowly wider or translating (moving sideways say) over perhaps a few months then think about getting some advice but don't leave it, if days or less then act quickly and take professional advice. You need to be a bit like Columbo here. Strangely, small cracks are often harder to diagnose than big ones. There may be only one or two cracks or there may be lots of small hairline cracks. Often when you have say one big crack the causes are more easily indentified. The stating point is to recognise that houses move all the time. The materials they are constructed from tend to be different - timber - steel - concrete - brick etc and all these materials age and behave in different ways. They expand and contract differently when the temperature goes up or down for example. The house sits on the ground and this too moves about. Bri44 has a clay soil. Clay behaves in a different way from say sandy / gravel type soils. One key difference is that they can shrink and swell depending on how much water they have in them (moisture content). With that in mind some of the things you look at are: Is the site level? Are the founds at the same or different depths - If you have a dry summer then the upper layers of clay tend to be drier than the ones below so they shink by different amounts. Thus the foundations go up and down by different amounts and this leads to differential movement.. which can cause cracking. Do you have any trees or hedges near the house. When in leaf the vegitation sucks the water out the clay soil and causes it to shrink. If you have cut down a tree then it can take a number of years for the soil to read adjust and it will move a bit (usually swell) when it does so. If you have a leaking drain then it can cause the clay to swell locally and this can lift the foundation up while the rest is staying still or shrinking or moving down under perhaps dry summer conditions. Again, if you have installed a new drain that is deep with say pea gravel round it you can sometimes drain the clay and this can cause it to shrink. There are a multitude of factors to consider so it's not always easy. If you have a house with very deep foundations at one end and shallow ones at the other and with a lot of infilled ground round the house at the deep end then as the fill settles over time it can drag down the walls a bit, add load to the founds via the dragging on the walls and they settle a bit more. Often if you are designing piles with made ground you'll examine this effect closely. Moving up to the superstructure. The type and shape of the cracks can tell you a bit. You have a look at where any movement joints are placed in the walls and if they are in the right location. Has the building been altered? If you have knocked out a load bearing wall and put in a beam you often change the way the founds are loaded and this too can result in a bit of cracking. Importantly you want to look at the rest of the house. Are the roof tiles out of alignment. Go inside the attic and look here. Small movements at ground level can be amplified up at roof level so are sometimes easier to spot. Are the doors and windows working ok.. have you notice they are starting to jamb in places? Has the house been left unheated or over heated... are the floors level. Is there other development going on, under or near your house.. The above is just a flavour of what you want to look at. Once you gather all this information you hope that you'll have some idea as to the causes. Then you work out if you need to do anything or just monitor the situation and see if things settle down. More often than not for small cracks it a case of keep an eye on it. You can use "tell tales" or precise levelling techniques to montor movement before you resort to drastic measures. For the curious there is a good document published by the BRE (BRE251) which gives some good guidance and goes some way towards categorising the size and type of cracks. Lastly, Columbo always solves even the most complex of cases. But with small cracks you may just end up with a short list of suspects but no arrest and subsequent conviction.

I don't want to use wifi. I want hardwired automation as much as possible. besides, it goes without saying that the kids are happy to eat bread and water as long as daddy has his toys to play with.

Perhaps a change of diet or put away the porn.

Come and dump in in my shop, all the other (expletive deleted)ers do.

yeh, basically theres a long bay probably about 20m long? there are no defined spaces within so you just park whereever alongside the kerb. the end of the bay stops pretty much at the boundary with the semi next to us. we are so keen to press on however, if we really aren't allowed the dropped kerb, then we'd have to turn it into a garden or something i think rather than hardstanding. so would mean ripping it all up if unsuccesful to do a garden. ah yes i am feeling quite inclined at the moment!! i actually was thinking how easy it would be to scrub out the edge of the bay on the road and make it shorter ? i keep reading horror stories where people have done that and the council made them put it back!!