ToughButterCup

Someone needs to tell yer man that he needs to skim the topsoil off first - offload to the right - and then subsoil - offload to the left . That way you can re-fill the trench and replace the original topsoil. Not have to buy some in. Easy peasy. I dunno - amateurs.?

And shaking ( ? sorry couldn't resist it). I agree completely. Louvres aren't structural - I think that would have been the architect's point. But we are we are. Short of trawling the Internet, looking at buildings with similar facades, and asking here, there's not much more that I can do. I anticipate reducing the twisting by attaching some 4 by 4 to the back of groups of (say) 10 verticals. The attachment would be by cross halving joints. The less Teutonic bit of me thinks that simply screwing lengths of 2 by 2 across the backs would do. Or 3 by 2 maybe. It's what seems to happen in loads of barns round here. Hit and miss boarding has a diagonally cut bit of 4 by 4 attached to the backs of the boarding. And mostly only one, sometimes two in any vertical 3 meter run.

Our design shows louvres that surround the Winter Garden. The louvres are the dark area. The nearest face has about 46 louvres (spaced 75mm apart) The current design shows that they should be attached like this ; ... put differently - the architect is proposing to secure an (on average) 3 meter long piece of timber top and bottom by welding a bit of angle iron ontop of (and underneath) the top and bottom beams , and then a screw (or bolt) through that to the bit of 100 by 38. (Siberian Larch - see image above) Naaaah. Not good enough. Das geht nicht! It gets windy here. So, after hours of Tinternet roaming, I bumped into Australian Government advice on attaching vertical louvres. Thats better methinks. Except the wood is only 38mm thick. So how about fastening the wood top and bottom by inserting it in a bit of channel with an internal channel 39mm wide? (And welding that channel to the beam) I will, of course, be reducing lateral movement in the verticals by attaching 2 meter lengths of 4 by 4 across the louvres - cross halving joints perhaps. I think it would be a good idea to stagger those cross members too. Your thoughts would be welcome.

We're 6 miles North of you Gary. It was windy, but not that bad. Pop round for a coffee if bored.... ?

Might it be worth asking - perhaps not on this thread..... ?

Hey Vijay, when yer done, pop round and give ours a coat or two eh? A nice restrained greenish blue would be good.....

Durisol, @Conor Very pleased indeed that your are going with Hilard. Top company. Saved us many thousands of pounds.

In 2017, we nearly had our water connected: but our wall collapse kind of distracted us. So the connection wasn't completed. We accepted a quote at that time of £866. Fast forward two years and here we are again, but they want to charge us £1113 this time for the same connection. The first quote was not time limited. There's a Foot Note on the estimate stating that the estimate is time limited, but no time limit is given. The second estimate (the higher of the two) does have a time limit: 3 months. Is it reasonable to stand on ceremony and argue that, since the first quote was not time limited, the original (lower) estimate should stand? I know its not much , but .... £250 - I mean, I could stand a round in our local for that.

Nail. Head. Bang on. Choosing 'an' SE nearly cost us a lot of money. Choosing the right one saved us many times his fee. (Passiv slab , Tanners). They in turn knew nowt about ICF, so we used the ICF manufacturers SE. Just go through the Due Diligence process with each. Fee proposal, References, examples of similar work .... Follow up references

A Bosch, anal, and lacking experience always falls back on - Das muss Millimeter perfekt sein Junge ! For me, Tommy, ze vorrying is over. Jawohl !

They could serve a Stop Notice on you. Have a look on your Council website - the Planning bit - and see if there have been any Stop Notices served this century. If there are, read them and have a look at their thresholds for action - if , recently, anyone has a Stop Notice in a use case similar to yours then be a little cautious. If I were in your shoes, I think I'd just get on with it. If all the bits of paper are in, why on earth would they bother to make their own lives harder? Just do it.

My hands aren't what they used to be; so in cutting 110 soil pipe, I need to make some sort of jig to hold it. I came up with this jig - and I'm hoping some of the nerd herd ( @Onoff's term not mine -but it's a good one) who have done this task a lot will put me right. Two bits of 4 by 2 a little over 110 mm apart, fixed to a bit of 9 by 2. That in turn is screwed to the bench top (a scaffold board). It's a bit wider than 110 to allow me to grip the pipe so it doesn't turn. My hands just won't / haven't got enough 'spread' or power to grip the pipe any more. This is the jig The old dressing gown enables the pipe to be gripped a bit ... But this is the wobbly result .... maybe a different type of saw would help? I suppose I could file the end smooth and square - I was very tempted to put the pipe through the crosscut saw: cowardice or caution -- not sure which stopped me.

This what I use, I have often been accused of over-engineering things. 120mm Thunderbolts

Wish I'd known about that system; I seem to be thinking that quite often, recently.

and make sure you tip it into the barrow directly over its center of gravity otherwise .... a-swearing you will go ...

Hmmm Clive, my speed-reading ain't wadit ewestabee.

Piece of plywood will do (maybe not OSB) ... or one of these. Always rinse them off before the muck goes hard.....? and work out in advance how not to swill the mixture off into yer mum's flower-bed (like I did ?)

Good for you son. Keep yer brain engaged. Most of the old-hands on this board have no idea that they know massive amounts of stuff. They've forgotten how long they have been learning, forgotten how hard-won - and sometimes bitterly so - their experience is. That pain is long forgotten. Now, to them, its all second nature. In the research papers on learning its called encultured knowedge. Long serving teachers suffer the same phenonmenon too. But its not second nature to you or me.

@zoothorn , I know exactly how you feel (felt ?) , I think. I didn't have a clue when I started mixing 'muck' four years ago. So I did lots of research and - gently - asked what to some were annoying questions - many people have no idea why they mix concrete as they do - and many YooChube videos later, if anything my level of understanding was worse, cos there's nowt like Tinternet for shared ignorance. And for something as simple as this? Well, it isn't. The variations and permutations of what you can / should / might / ought to do are endless. Very few instructional videos start with a simple statement of the end-in-mind, fewer still explain why the videographer did not use techniques that one might reasonably expect. Because doing that is hard. But you can START simple. And begin to learn to enjoy making mistakes. Took me a while did that.

Used mine for the first time yesterday. Hooked it up to a Bosch crosscut saw and a Bosch Hoover (its own current sensing device never worked). There's a five second delay in both 'spool-up' and ''' spool down ' time. Works fine. I'll try using the Hoover as the master and crosscut and table saws as the slaves next.

Is that all you need - dont you 'have' to insulate all the way inside the duct ? I ask, because that's my (almost) next job. Before UU comes to make the connection. Real next job is go down the pub. I've had one o' them days.

And the newts, God, the newts, they'll chew through anything.?

Mark at Pro Wood said exactly that : sometimes supplies of a type of wood 'dry up' for a wide range of reasons.

Practical example - happened a few minutes ago: talking to Alex one of their their senior guys : price of Siberian Larch. (Pro Wood Wigan) Pro Wood is most exposed to the value of the pound internationally. He cant see the value of the pound being stable in the near future. Order going in a little later today when I've had a more precise measure up ....

Your question, perhaps light hearted, is important. Who funds the study? The manufacturer? If so the conflict of interest is obvious. Is that why Topps Tiles (can / have to) charge so much more for their PTV (pendulum test value) tested tiles? Might be worth a dig around one of these days - when I've nowt else to do. ?