jack

I'd learnt to like the tap at those prices - great buying!

Our scaffolders were utter rubbish too. I had to get them back twice to get the first installation right, and they argued repeatedly that I was at fault. Due to overhangs, at a couple of points the scaffold had to be stepped out from the footprint. I gave them a clear diagram of what was needed when they quoted me, then again on their first day, and again on each day they returned to try and fix what they'd done (unfortunately, I was only able to be onsite right at the start of each day, or I'd have been able to supervise them). The diagram included big letters saying "don't follow the foundation line, follow where the scaffold is shown in this drawing". I also explained to them what I needed and why, but they still repeatedly stuffed it up. I ended up concluding that the owner wasn't necessarily nasty, but was almost certainly illiterate and extremely thick. Most of the other trades seemed to dislike scaffolders on principle.

There's always a first time!

Gyproc QuickSand Joint Cement: "A new easy to sand air-drying powdered jointing material. For the finishing stage over Gyproc Joint Filler."

Perfect, thanks all.

Just returning to this (September last year? Jaysus!) and now about to order the materials for this job. In addition to the fermacell walls, I also have to tape and join some TE boards on the ceiling. Given the amount I have to do, for price reasons I'm going to use some sort of Gyproc filler. Their joint filler is cheap, but it says in this guide that you can't use joint filler as a final coat. Is that an installation issue (eg, too hard to sand) or just an aesthetic one? For TE boards, any preference to using Easi-fill for both, or Joint Filler first with, eg, Joint Cement over the top? @nod - any thoughts? Thanks

Agreed. Here's a couple of extracts from our slab, showing the ringbeam and "spines" down the centre of the house, which take the linear loads of external and internal loadbearing walls respectively. The ringbeam section is as shown in the link posted by @PeterW above. The purple "thickenings" through the centre of the house look like this: The section for the red thickenings are the same, but with EPS 100 where EPS 300 is shown in the drawing immediately above.

Ours is 200mm. You don't need ultra-close spacings if you're going low temp and have good insulation.

Always made me think "consigliere"

Both of those changes happened before either company got really big though (if you haven't read it, A Perfect Store: Inside eBay is an interesting read). I suspect you're right about selling off the tool division. It would certainly make for a cleaner break to not have the power tool division brand diluting the rest of the company after the sale. It may take years to get traction on the brand change, but maybe that's their schedule.

I know that, but I suspect a lot of the general public doesn't. My point was that the new name - whatever the reason for the choice to change it at the time they did - makes the organisation's focus clearer to the general public.

Not in the case of Snickers. The same chocolate bar was known as Snickers worldwide for decades before the UK change. I don't know why it was originally called a Marathon bar in the UK, but they only changed it to Snickers to align it with what the rest of the world was doing. Re CORGI, I assume they changed the name so that it gave a better impression to the general public of what the registration meant. No idea whether anyone got paid a lot of money for the new name though!

Company name, not brand. If you didn't know how Japanese business names worked (KK or Kabushiki Kaisha for limited company), you could just as well have assumed that "Koki" meant "Limited".

It was the power tool division I was talking about (I wasn't replying to SteamyTea). Not that I've spent any time at all looking, but I don't recall ever seeing a "Hitachi Koki" branded power tool, whatever the company name may have been. For the typical power tool purchaser, this is a change of brand from Hitachi to HiKOKI - and that involves, as I said, throwing away decades of brand recognition and introducing a completely new (and imo horrible) brand.

If you ride, it's also great for giving the bike a quick rinse at the end of a ride. Not an issue in summer, but washing a bike down with cold water in winter can be a very unpleasant experience.

From memory, the power for our external blinds goes through each window aperture, between the top of the window frame and the overhead reveal. It's held in place by the low-expansion foam that seals around the window, and sealed by airtightness tape. Not sure that's the best way - a conduit through the insulation would probably be better, especially in terms of airtightness - but we weren't sure of where and how we'd need to connect the blind motors, so left it until the windows arrived after the insulation had been installed. I find external power points useful for things like pressure washing, power tools, electric garden tools, temporary lights, stereos and chargers. I wouldn't flood the place with them, but I do think that one in each place around the house where any of these sorts of things would be used is helpful. The one outside the garage gets used a fair bit. We also have one near our front door which can be used for Christmas lights. This is also the time for putting in conduits through the walls for things like: External lighting (including wall lights, but also garden lighting if you haven't left one or more conduits through the slab to run that) External sensors CCTV (including front door intercom if likely to ever be of interest) Taps - I wish we'd put in more of these. We have one on the left side of the house, and another at the back. We could have done with one on the right, at least. Also, if you're having a water softener, consider putting a softened tap to where you wash the car (if you do that at home). A hot tap (which will also be softened if you have a softener) would also be useful. I wish we'd put a hot tap in to rinse the dog. We thought we'd be clever having a shower installed in the mud room, but the amount of dirt that comes off the muddy-puddle-loving dog most days means that it's a lot of effort cleaning up after giving her a rinse. It'd be a lot easier if this could be done outside in an area where a bit of dirt wouldn't matter. Doorbell - I've lost count of the number of people I know who've built houses or done substantial renovations, only to realise that they didn't run a wire for a doorbell! They end with with cheap plasticky doorbells stuck to their lovely new front door frame with double sided adhesive.

But WHY? Seems crazy to me to throw away decades of brand recognition and introduce a completely new (and imo horrible) brand.

We had an overweight (big-framed too) guy onsite and he was one of the fastest people we used. Really cracked on. I mean, he did a shit job, of course, but he did finish things quickly.

This is the one that drives me mental. Tried this several times. Still got shit quality. I used to think the problem was that they didn't care. Then I thought that maybe it's a matter of them lacking skills. In the end, I concluded that a lot of tradespeople literally have no concept of what a quality result in their trade looks like, nor any interest in knowing what that result looks like. Without that, you'll never develop the skills needed to deliver it.

I don't bother with boosting. Even in the coldest depths of winter with sequential hot showers, all trace of condensation is gone within an hour or so. And that's with the boost set at less than half that suggested by building regs.

And make sure it's solid copper, not copper coated aluminium (CCA). Agree with everything above. If you're dead set on making provision for fiber, run some conduit (making sure you only use long, sweeping bends - perhaps look up minimum radius for fiber).

Thread locked due to commercial content in the last (now hidden) post.

I originally include a sentence about one's wrist needing a break before the batteries would run out, but I didn't want to leave an opening (fnarr fnarr) for @SteamyTea

Agreed. I can't imagine what sort of if work you'd have to be doing to get through two of those batteries in an hour.

Much better, but still not perfect. One of the earlier jobs my wife took on was screwing down chipboard flooring using spax floor screws with a torx head. Somehow she still managed to regularly get it off-axis enough for slippage to occur. She just didn't seem to be able to "feel" where vertical was. It's nothing to do with her being a woman, I should add. It's a skill like any other, and comes with time and practice. I remember when I was younger that I never seemed to be able to drill perpendicularly, but I'm mostly okay now. My wife had just never touched a drill until these tasks arose.