ToughButterCup

Yes, because it's easy.

I'm thinking of having a swear box on site: to which I will, of course, contribute the most. It'll do to finance Friday Night Is Party Night in West Lancashire Off to swing a little more on the scaffolding - and contemplate uplighters.

Forewarned is fore-armed. How do you fit lights like this properly @ProDave? Specifically ....but still leaves you terminating the flex straight to the lamp holder with nowhere to lose the slack... How do you avoid that?

There's always one @Moira Niedzwiecka : tek na notice; 'ee's only jelus. Well done you for ferreting around and getting them for a decent price. Let the sparkies strut their stuff - they charge more than enough anyway. ?

And the rest. Ours is well over 10 years old now. Every time I move I seem to celebrate by buying a new Bosch dishwasher. I have never had anything go wrong with any of the three we bought. The machine will be long out of warranty before anything fails. Keep it it clean. Monthly rinse with dishwasher cleaner, twice over Christmas and New Year. Descale twice as often as a kettle if necessary.

I'm working hard at understanding these two concepts thoroughly. And the Internet is probably the worst and best place in the world to sort it out. Worst because of the shared ignorance everywhere, best because BH will sort it out . Pull the following semi-formed thoughts to bits, please....... Air-tightness is about the restriction of air movement BOTH into and out of a building to values, at the very least, that are acceptable to BC. And air contains water vapour. So action to increase air-tightness might well also contribute to vapour control. Here's Keira Proctor of the Proctor Group saying that air-tightness layers can act as a vapour control. (Expanded webinar transcript, https://www.proctorgroup.com/news/vapour-and-air-permeable-membranes-explained#expand-webinar-transcript accessed May 2018) Is it too naive to ask - well why bother with a Vapour Control Layer when the Air-tightness Layer will do the same job? Vapour Control Many on BH have written about interstitial condensation. I get it. Don't let warm air leak out into the fabric of the house so that it comes into contact with cooler bits and so - precipitates water which then pools there and does all sorts of nasty stuff, from mould to rust to other nasties. Take a warm roof. Slates (say) will be cold, and water vapour exiting the house would normally condense on the underside of the slates. So you need roofing felt (vapour control) allowing the vapour to exit, but not return. A bit like a Gortex jacket (other jackets are available) . I have heard that referred to as Vapour Permeable Underlay, VPU (not VCL). But it is acting as a Vapour Control Layer [Thank Gaud its not shortened to VPL ?] Now, I'm under the impression that a house needs BOTH a VCL and an air-tightness layer. And IF that is correct doesn't it make sense (because it would be cheaper) to prevent vapour leaving the house by using the air-tightness layer as a VCL? prevent ingress of vapour in the same way? And put the air-tightness layer where there are least penetrations? But then I'd be wrong, I wager. Looking at whats available; the specs, the advice, the drivel, the spurious claims on Tinternet, I feel like my roofer mate. It used to be so simple

Thanks folks. In the 70s I had an Army Permanent Staff Instructor ; he regularly growled sweetly into my ear: "Lad, you've got two speeds: dead slow and stop" He was right. Then as now, I feel as if I have a concrete block on each foot. But this is a marathon not a sprint.

Wallplate fitted, ridge beam fitted (nearly), rafters up, insulation fitted in between. Who's a clever boy then? ? Maybe over-worried about fixing the wall straps through to the concrete, I chased the Durisol back to the concrete and fitted the wall straps direct to it. This is where we are now (looking up from the floor); I need to make good on top of the wall straps. Which ? Foam, Durisol, Sand and Cement? (Can't Avoid.... )

Got Debbie making me our own sauerkraut now: proper job, gets yer teeth tingling

There's an interesting doctorate in here somewhere: The pathology of Self Build Stress; towards active coping mechanisms.

The sun and the cicadas have a way of switching you off......

☺️

I'm not @joe90 Right, thanks, I'll get on with it. Now where's that @epsilonGreedy chap? He's full of beans at the moment. If you see him tell him to get his arse down here and do some work.

Yes Terry, you will. How about a little trip to Greece? That should put some more goodness into your system

Excellent. Good to be reminded about that bit of the build. Why not continue your holiday by choogling up the M6 and mixing some parge coat for me? When that's done there's... and there's... and after that ....

What is health? Its a series of things. I assume you too @epsilonGreedy heard, read that bit about fitness and manual labour. That hastily written article , is a summary based on a BJSM paper. Quoting directly from the source What are the new findings? We are the first to find evidence consistent with the physical activity paradox in a systematic review with meta-analysis, summarising evidence from 17 longitudinal studies with 1 93 696 participants. We showed that men engaging in high (compared with low) level occupational physical activity have a 18% increased risk of all-cause mortality, even after adjustment for relevant factors, such as leisure time physical activity. This evidence indicates that physical activity guidelines should differentiate between occupational and leisure time physical activity. http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2018/04/17/bjsports-2017-098540 (accessed May 2018) The study is based on other studies (meta analysis), and just before the conclusion the article includes this caveat Studies included in this review were based only on self-reports of occupational PA and all but one [...] used crude categories (with heterogeneous definitions) to operationalise occupational PA exposure. That is academic code for '... beware this might all be complete bollox...' It's based on self-reporting. And ( I am trying to be really fair about a weak piece of research ) the authors do say..... that they need to develop better measures in order to be more confident of their conclusions A weak piece of journalism based on a research paper that the researchers themselves say is weak. Go figure.

Either side of the Velux in our roof, is a doubled rafter. Have a look: There's a slight gap between them, one or two mm: not much, but enough to make me think that something needs to be done. One rafter has a slight twist in it.... Foam? Bolt? Screw? Ignore? Foam and bolt? Get a life?

Its the local tipple Their advertising campaign is ; once a week, a large bus took drinkers from one of their local pubs to the brewery show us the whole process put on a massive Lancashire hot pot let us drink as much Bomber as we like bus us home lock-in stagger home at 2 or 3 in the morning King brilliant. I used to go every year. I always had to have the following day off. Too old to survive that punishment now.

Used to ship drugs maybe?

My point is simple. @ultramods's proposal is generous: but massively difficult. If it were easy, the problem would have been solved years ago. BH isn't the only immensely valuable online Community of Practice: with messy data. I simply caution - the job of structuring that data is huge. I would hate someone to start such an enterprise without appreciating the difficulty of the task. You are right, @SteamyTea, nobody else is talking about a list of links either. If someone believes they could have a go at producing some form of synthesised structured information based on BH data (any BH member that is) they are free to do so. Where online it is published matters not a jot. Linking to the structured data is trivial.

OK @SteamyTea, go for it. Plenty of free web space available ...... develop your own content .... then link to it here..... Just like @Construction Channel has had the guts, persistence and skill to do.

There is no resistance from me @ultramods. Just caution about the size of the job and similar caution about it's specification.

Ed, not quite. I merely meant to suggest that in addition to the essential policing role played by moderators, some members (not necessarily moderators) might like to summarise, precis, derive checklists... But it takes time and effort. And all of us are really busy anyway - or if not, then knackered. @SteamyTea has it about right .... I mean a form of editing : clearing up the mess, making stuff easy to read, linking ideas, laying out jumbled thought into an easy to understand order.

I read @Onoff's bathroom fable as exactly that: even experienced guys get it wrong, get distracted, get it badly wrong, have wives who demonstrate the highest level of patience, teach me loads without knowing that they're doing so.....

Switch on, download, cook a meal, pop down the pub, comeback, restart. Put it in its place. Don't let it control you. Nay borra, Jimmie.