AliG

Much as it may have been well intentioned, it is another piece of costly bureaucracy. We had a meeting at work and the conservative position we are taking is that even anyone who you have contact details for means that you have their personal information which now has to be managed, deleted etc. One interesting point I came up with is that any organisation that you have had a disagreement with in the past you can now go back and ask what info they have on file on you. Have they marked you as a problem customer etc. You could also do this local councils, companies, schools etc. Of course the email spammers who don't care about the law will just ignore it whilst it becomes a massive burden on every law abiding business.

We have a system using the Ubiquiti AC Lite product. With 100MB Virgin WiFi awe are getting over 80MB over WiFi to a laptop. They should also have enough speed to continue to work as your internet connection speeds up, I am tempted to change my Virgin subscription up to 300MB to see what happens. I noticed the other day an article about people getting less than half the speed they pay for on their internet connection. I suspect that this is based on Speedtests done over WiFi. The reason it is so slow is often the poor WiFi not the poor connection. In our last house a 75MB Sky connection(the actual speed the fibre modem was connecting at) dropped to around 45MB over WiFi in the room closest to the router, 35MB in other rooms with Sky Q boxes and 15-25 in the rest of the house. Try not to use WiFi extender type products, they cripple your WiFi speed. Before I connected all my Sky Q boxes up using ethernet in the old house, they connected 2 wireless extenders into the system and the speed dropped to 11MB. These eat up your bandwidth. I would put a Ubiquiti AC Lite on each floor connected over WiFi. They are £75ish each on Amazon, or £300 for 5.

A small chandelier has just gone into our en suite, my wife really wanted chandeliers in our en suite and the WC. I'll post more pics of the ensuite when it is finally finished. It is one of the last parts of the house to be completed.

Yes, we are really pleased with them. I have to give my wife the credit for picking most of the lights. I picked the wall lights.

Turned the heating off to try and figure out how much gas we were using for hot water. Appears to be around £2 a day. This seemed very high, but having looked into it, it is the recirculating hot water system. The loop is around 70m long. From what I can find on line 28mm pipe loses around 50w per meter per hour. Thus it probably costs around 10p per hour in gas to recirculate the hot water. The builder also decided not to insulate the pipe as it is internal. This would maybe have helped a bit, but my reading on-line says that it is an inherently wasteful system to have instant hot water. I have set the pump to be on in the morning, after school and before bed which is when people are most likely to bath or shower, but that family is giving me a lot of grief for not having it on all the time.

@Mr Punter as requested. The poor piano has been moved all over the place and is finally where it is supposed to go. That's me to give some scale. We love the way that the lights reflect off all the glass and the floor at night. These are basically the finished stairs. They still have lights to go in on the underside of the front edge of the treads.

I got the lights from here - https://www.aliexpress.com/store/top-rated-products/342455.html?spm=2114.12010615.0.0.6d673d16SBgstF&tracelog=topselling_tab They stopped advertising them not long after I bought them, but they might be able to supply them if asked. They were a fraction of the price of the real lights. The big ones are more expensive as they have to be airfreighted. I have bought lights from 6 different companies on Aliexpress. Every single one has been no trouble at all and exactly as described/. One light was missing a piece and they put it straight in the post no arguing about it. Considering the prices it really does make you wonder how much mark up there is on items by the time they have made their way through the supply chain. It is hard to say that they are Chinese knock offs as most items of this kind will have been made in China anyway. I cannot find anyone currently advertising larger than a 700mm light in the same style. I have 2 of the 1000mm diameter ones. Here are some of the current ones on sale https://www.aliexpress.com/item/LED-Modern-Fireworks-Pendant-Lamps-Ball-Stars-Hanging-Pendant-Lights-Fixture-Nordic-Hotel-Shopping-Mall-Home/32816818288.html?spm=2114.10010108.1000014.4.2055421dADg2yt&scm=1007.13338.98644.000000000000000&scm_id=1007.13338.98644.000000000000000&scm-url=1007.13338.98644.000000000000000&pvid=8615d8be-51a5-4a19-8dbf-0de78796e7a7&_t=pvid:8615d8be-51a5-4a19-8dbf-0de78796e7a7,scm-url:1007.13338.98644.000000000000000 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Modern-Creative-Chandelier-Dimmable-LED-Fireworks-Pendant-Lamps-Stainless-Steel-Ball-Lights-For-Bar-Restaurant-Lamparas/32816920317.html?spm=2114.10010108.1000015.5.7bea54e1fH8gQC&s=p I find it often easier to find something on Aliexpress to find something similar then look at the list of other suppliers and other products form the seller at the bottom of the page. It is not always obvious what name the product has been given. Another thing that you can do is an image search on Google.

I found this article that goes into reasonable detail about it. https://www.getwestlondon.co.uk/news/west-london-news/grenfell-tower-fire-millions-spent-14435366 It seems that the council have bought 307 homes but they are not all occupied yet. It is not clear if they have actually bought more houses than needed and are planning to house other people. It appears that they have spent around £765,000 per home. They have also spent around £25m on hotel accommodation. This is not a high amount to spend in that area where house prices are extremely high. Of course this then gets you to the question of should tax payers pay to house people in areas where the average tax payer themselves could not afford to live. This isn't really relevant to Grenfell but more of a general question.

The staircase was supplied by a company called Angus and Mack who are just outside Edinburgh. http://angusandmack.com I don't know the radius, we settled on it by looking at 3d renders until it looked right. The treads are roughly 215mm deep at the narrow end and 340mm at the wide end. They are 1100mm across with the staircase being 1200mm wide.

We still aren't quite finished, creeping ever closer. Mostly working outside on retaining walls in the garden and finally they are installing the stone archway at the front door. A couple of pictures though. We love the way that the crystals in the WC light create a pattern on the walls. Feature brick wall with arches that my wife really wanted being installed.

This is exactly what I did, I thought with 2.7m ceilings I needed taller doors so I went metric. I would have liked 2.2m doors, but was too tight to pay to have them made. I think our openings were around your size to take a 2040mmx826mm door. It is, however, surprising how few doors are available in metric sizes and even fewer fire or glass doors in metric sizes if you need them. I have the walnut version of this Deanta door and they are very nice with the added benefit that they make them as fire and glass fire doors. They are around £100 ex VAT. https://www.leaderdoors.co.uk/doors-c14/internal-doors-c111/internal-oak-doors-c119/internal-oak-fully-finished-seville-solid-door-p38437#

Pictures as promised - The WC is not quite finished, but almost. The grout needs tidying up, and there are lights to go in the alcoves. We have 4 identical sinks like this, plus a double one on our bedroom. Part f the reason for ending up with 4 was that when we priced them up initially the sinks were only maybe £200 more than wall mounted ceramic sinks, much to my surprise. Months later they discovered that they had forgotten to include the cost of the quite substantial brackets.

I know, but it's nice to dream. There is a great fake news story doing the rounds about a guy who won the lottery and then dumped thousands of tonnes of manure on his boss's garden. I don't care that it's fake as it made me smile.

Builder fired brickie doing garden walls last week. I think it's the only time someone has been fired during the build. Was fed up with him apparently spending all day talking and not working. Also he apparently was taking a very strong interest in the house, the window frames, when I was away working etc. The next night the chains were cut holding the site security gates closed. We have had no issues in two years of building. Bizarrely nothing was taken. I got a much sturdier replacement chain. Weird thing is the pedestrian gate isn't even locked as we have moved in. The builder did call the brickie just to make sure that he knew he was under suspicion.

Would it be petty to think that many of your deliveries could accidentally block his driveway.