jack

Same place Herb mentioned above: aplaceforeverything.co.uk/elfa My wife said they were very helpful and made a couple of useful suggestions. One minor thing: we ordered two different shelf sizes, and only one was delivered. My wife is contacting them today to discuss - will let you know how we get on.

Thanks all. Did a bit of research and went with the Elfa system in the end (thanks @HerbJ). A major factor was time - much as I'd love to have built this as a project, realistically, there's a lot of other more important stuff that needs doing, and work is completely flat out at the moment. In the end, convenience trumped everything else. It arrived on Friday, and was installed in no time. Not cheap, but clearly well made and should last a long time. I also like the fact that it'll be easy to reconfigure as needed. I'm so happy that I'll be acquiring some more to do the wardrobe in the guest room. As a bonus, I can install it now and we can use it for storage, despite the fact the the wardrobe hasn't actually been built yet!

We have 65mm polished concrete on top of an MBC slab. We were warned that 75mm was the minimum, and we do have three cracks that might not have been there if the slab had been a little thicker. I do think we'd have avoided them if the stress relief cuts had been done a little better, but that's just my inexpert opinion. Sorry not much help, but that's the standard polishable concrete situation as it was put to us. There are various epoxy-based topping products, but I don't think they look much like concrete, and I believe they're very expensive. How far away is the current result from what you were hoping for?

Ha, not really! Maybe go around before you get the survey and make sure there's nothing that would make a bat specialist start worrying about the potential for bats to be roosting. Things like access holes or cavities with accessible gaps.

You're not the first person to have mentioned this...

The Ring video doorbell system seems reasonably well reviewed. I know a couple of people who have them and are happy with the performance.

Also consider whether you'd ever have CCTV. If so, a couple of cable runs for that would be useful. One other thing you need to consider carefully is where all this cabling comes back to. @Hecateh, do you have somewhere that you could put terminate all these cables and position a router/switch? Ideally it'd be somewhere near where your phone/internet comes in.

Or better yet, don't!

No doubt there's an element of that.

My parents lived in the UK for several years in the early 70s based on that right. Ireland's relationship with the EU is the complicating factor. I don't presently see any approach to the Irish border that will satisfy the UK, Ireland and the EU, made worse by the fact that the EU seems intent on using it as a cudgel - or should that be shillelagh? - with which to beat the UK.

Yes, I knew about that one. My parents are Irish and my sister has an Irish passport. I may get one depending on what Brexit ends up looking like. My kids are also entitled to one, so it'll just be the poor missus standing at immigration trying to blag her way into Europe when we go on hols.

09:17 and I've already learned something this morning! Re: the problem with Octopus, have you tried calling back? Sometimes the problem with call centres is the individual, so if you get someone else you may get further.

Oh FFS, what is wrong with people? Glad the planning officer saw sense.

Surely something was written down? They must have had some written indication of where the cutout was going, for example?

Morning all Taking a break from balconies due to the weather, and looking at getting some other jobs done. We have a linen press on our upstairs landing that presently has no internal shelving. It's quite big, so there's lots of shelving needed: I have a rough idea of what the layout looks like - we need some smaller shelves for linen, some bigger ones for boxes, and one tall area for a vacuum cleaner. I'm interested in how best to construct these shelves. I was thinking about using battens on the walls to support the outer edges of the shelves, but given how wide this is, I'll need at least one central support as well. I was therefore thinking something like a central post (bottom of the "p" in "cup'd above", with horizontals going back to the rear wall. Is there an easier way? I'd also like to use slats rather than solid shelves. Any suggestions for what sort of wood and where to buy? Oak or another hardwood would be nice, but given how much I need that could be an expensive exercise for something that's largely out of sight. Obviously where sheets and towels are involved, the wood will need to be non-staining. Lacquer will help with that, but again, any particular suggestions for particular finishes? Thanks as always.

My Brink unit is the same. It makes sense - why provide two bypasses and valves when one is sufficient?

But isn't that just overpricing in the beginning and then the market catching up? From where I sit, if it takes 3-4 years to sell, then the price (at the time it was set) was too high. I suppose if the market has done nothing over that time, then perhaps it does show a local oddity based on generally low demand.

Had exactly the same problem on my build. I can't offer any advice, but you have my sympathy!

Absolutely! This is a proper emergency situation as a result of their negligence.

Ours is the same, but the flap isn't proportional.

How did it know that you had a leak? Does it monitor flow rates and look for out-of-the-ordinary parameters (like continuous water usage overnight)?

The way the slab sticks out from the wall in the top version is not a nice detail at all. I remember looking into Glapor for some reason before we decided to go with an insulated slab, and I recall it being eye-wateringly expensive. I'd be interested to see the cost of implementing this in the way it's shown, along with the supplier's thoughts on mitigating the thermal bridge.

We have one Purple Bricks sign on our road and I haven't seen any others in the area that I can recall. It's been on for many months, but to be fair, the price is very optimistic.

No mozzies here at the moment, but we have harvest mites in our garden and it seems I'm very tasty to them (wife never gets bitten). The bites are the itchiest things I've ever experienced in my life. I thought I'd conquered them by always wearing long trousers, but they got to me again a couple of days ago, one right on the outside tip of my ankle. It's driving me nuts!

This dry weather seems to have suppressed the usual plagues of mosquitos that come in through open windows overnight. One thing to add to my earlier post: we have polished concrete floors throughout our ground floor, which helps with heat transfer. Tiles presumably would be similar, but i imagine you'd want to think about what affect other types of flooring would have. This wouldn't work very well with carpet, I imagine.