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It was her idea. She wanted a view of the garden whilst washing up. Don’t think she would have settled for a peep hole.

I think the point of big windows is to lose the separation between inside and outside. We have a huge window in front of our kitchen sink, so that when you are by the kitchen sink, you feel like you are standing in the garden. Similarly with our 2.2m high glass sliding doors; whether they are open or closed the lounge is almost seamlessly joined to the garden. You couldn’t achieve those effects without large pans of glass.

No, that’s not right. It’s definitely rated for outdoor. The spec list states it’s IP54 rated: https://www.4gon.co.uk/ubiquiti-unifi-access-point-wifi-6-pro-p-10059.html I agree, but it’s too late for that, unless I tear stuff up that was finished over a year ago. I will not do that. Simply because the cheap Ring doorbell was wired with CAT 5 without my knowledge. The house was all finished, only then did we discover our walls’ steel rods were acting as a faraday cage making the doorbell wasn’t working so well. There is not an easy way to link the internet router to the end of the doorbell’s power supply. I also don’t want to set up my own video recording station, Ring is convenient and I’ma sucker for convenience and have bought into their system. Intuitively, I’m also a little nervous about it sitting in water, but isn’ta direct burial cable exactly designed for that?

Effectively a whole 5 bed house from scratch, so a lot.

Are you talking about running CAT cable to the doorbell, as opposed to creating an external WiFi? If so, we actually have the capability to do that, as the electrician decided to power the doorbell with CAT 5 cable, but the PoE doorbells are stupidly priced, and I prefer to have an outdoor WiFi network so that I can install a few devices outside. If that wasn’t what you meant, I’m afraid I don’t understand your question/point.

I touched upon this in another thread about the waterproofness of the U6 Pro, but thought it deserved its own post: This is the basic plan of my front yard/driveway: The yellow line shows one possible path of an outdoor rated ethernet cable, siting the AP at the yellow triangle, pointing both down the side alley and towards the wifi doorbell (which is in desperate need of a better signal). The advantage of the yellow path is that we will get a very good signal for both the doorbell, only 3.4m away and down the alleyway where in due course we are likely to install a wifi camera,or if that is too close for an optimal signal, I can also raise the U6 Pro up higher off the ground as the fence there is very tall, about 2m high. The downside of the yellow route, is that apart from needing a longer cable (25m as opposed to 10), the cable will pass through a plastic water channel (marked as slot drain Driveline on the plan). This is easy enough to do, but means the cable will often be wet (but who cares, it's a cable designed for burial) and could impede the effectiveness of the drainage, though unlikely, as the drain is almost 10cm wide and the cable will at most be 1cm diameter. The downside of the red route is that the U6 Pro will have to be mounted quite close to the ground and about 80cm in front of it, there is going to be a big car parked, which will block the direct line of sight to the doorbell, so could interfere with the signal. Also, less chance of the signal travelling down the side of the alley way. Aesthetically it will also be more prominent there, whereas could be installed more discreetly if I go for the yellow option. I think I've answered my own question, but can anyone think of any issues with the yellow plan. Will a cable that is 15m to 20m longer than the red route make a very big difference to responsiveness of the doorbell?

That’s good to hear. Any thoughts on how good the signal is at travelling around the corner of a building and then through a steel gate? I’m thinking of mounting it in my front driveway facing towards the house, and trying to work out whether I will also need a separate device to cover the side alley of our house, which has a big 10 foot high steel gate at it’s entrance. Another consideration is whether an U6 Pro AP installed on one side of the driveway will manage to emit a good enough signal that when a car is parked in the driveway, it doesn’t block the signal to the other side of the driveway. Can’t really install it much higher than 110cm above ground level.

Bought this access point and was about to install it outside when a friend told me it needed a sheltered spot. He referred me to a review: ”the Ubiquiti U6-Pro was built to withstand outdoor conditions and the device is indeed IP54-rated which I suppose could ensure that it withstands some degree of abuse from the elements. But I would still be careful to not put it completely in the open. Make sure that there is some sort of roof above it, otherwise it’s not going to last that long.” Just wondering if anyone has any experience of installing Ubiquiti IP54 products outside, and whether you have had any issues. The spot I had planned does not have any shelter from rain.

I don’t know if the actual margin was £4K, that was just the difference between cheaper option 1, I contract directly with the English manufacturer (albeit the actual factory is in Poland), and they are responsible for everything; and Option 2, £4K more expensive, but quicker, contract with only other company authorised to sell this product in England, manufactured at same factory in Poland. The entity I contract with is responsible for surveying, supplying and installing. Everything. Both vendors in both options make money. I’m just guesstimating that if the vendor in Option 2 is £4K more expensive, although some of that might be additional cost, say a fee to get this exclusive joint venture deal with the manufacturer, there is margin to be made on the other aspects of the supply chain. So £4K is still a reasonable guess. They were ok. They worked too quickly in my opinion, ended up making mistakes and had to come back to fix a couple of issues. But they did come back, more than once, and were decent about it. Maybe 6.5 working days in total, including snagging, although the snagging was done by just one guy, so 11.5 man days total.

And yet it did not take anywhere near that long to install the windows! Two fitters attended, yes. But they were there for at most 5 days. So that is less than a quarter of a month’s salary for two installers (based on 4.33 weeks a month).

There is no chance in hell the intermediary was paying the same as the consumer. If the manufacturer can make a profit on the installation at £28k, I’m sure the intermediary could as well. The manufacturer teams up with the intermediary to get access to an alternative sales channel, so it gains from the partnership, and will give up some of its profit margin for that.

Well it might be rare, but it’s what I was going to do, as the manufacturer also offered a supply and installation service. But the wait was something like 18 weeks, and I was in a hurry and so the manufacturer put me in touch with a supplier that it had an exclusive contract with. They had a reserved space on the manufacturer’s assembly line, and as a consequence could get windows about 6 weeks quicker… but at a significant premium. It was an eye opener into the profit margins involved.

Well on my order, I was priced £28k by the manufacturer and £32k buy another supplier for exactly the same windows (made by the same manufacturer). So just on that quote, there must have been a pretty fat margin.

Similarly, I had a large 2G unit replaced twice, because the wave distortion was bad on both. Only I and the architect noticed it, but this was enough.

+1. Definitely replace it. The margins on windows are big enough that they will still be in profit, even with multiple cock-ups, as the price of individual parts, like the glazing units, is only a fraction of the overall sale price of the window.

Wheelbarrow left on outdoor porcelain patio tiles for about 10 days. Quite a bit of rain. Wheelbarrow has finally been moved and now there are patches of rust on the tiles where the barrow’s “feet” were resting on the tiles. There appear to be a multitude of products online for removing rust. Anyone have any recommendation as to a particularly good one?

20 to 25 tonnes of 15mm to 20mm gravel should cover that. That’s a lot of gravel.

Thinking of fitting something like this, to prevent damage to a perpendicular wardrobe door that is adjacent to our bedroom door, whilst still allowing us to fix the door open to facilitate a cross breaze at night. Anyone have any experience of using such items. SDS and ironmongery direct make similar. They seem like such a great idea, but what is the catch?

I think @Declan52’s point is that this thread, which I think is meant to be about the practicalities of remortgaging/mortgaging in the present market, is not aided or improved by the ins and outs of COVID.

Thanks all. I’m going to ask them to redo one of the doors so that we have a standard 3mm gap as per the drawings. They will have to do some edge matching with the veneer; I’m sure it’s possible.

Yeah, no idea why they chose these hinges. I feel like they got lazy and stopped thinking about it when finalising the project. Slightly odd that these hinges and their visibility wasn’t run past me.

I could do this, but it’s sub optimal. The small door that is too short which is above the drop down desk actually flips upwards, so that one can have a large monitor behind the two doors, with the top of the monitor at eye level. Yes, we were aware of this when we signed off on the drawings. It’s not too bad. It’s not so easy. The design of the bookcase is both bottomless and plinthless. It’sa design feature because we didn’t want to cover up the floor, and so this way the uprights of the bookcase look like they come out of the floor, very contemporary. That means that all the horizontal bits are fixed as they are needed for structure. They have been fixed with some particular fixings which means any adjustments in shelf or table height would result in significant surgery and scarring to the uprights. I guess they could raise it somehow, maybe by making the shelf that the desk attaches to thicker and then attach the desk from that raised part. This would leave a gap at the bottom of about 6mm, which would like like a mistake, but perhaps a less noticeable one.

So we are nearing the end of a very difficult joinery saga. We are now dealing with a fourth joinery. This last one, apart from being the most expensive, has on the whole been excellent to deal with, incredibly professional, and they even accept credit card. However, we have had an issue with an aspect of their installation. It relates to part of a giant bookcase (308cm tall and over 5m wide. The bookcase is made up of several columns and the final column has doors on it which were meant to be quite seamless, and include a concealed bureau style desk. Where the arrow is pointing on the photo, there was meant to be a 3mm gap (this is clearly labelled on the agreed final drawings) between the top door and the bottom door. The bottom door drops down to make a desk. But the gap has ended up being 8mm or 9mm thick. And as the edges of the desk are rounded off, this accentuates the black shadow behind (when it’s closed), and so it’s quite noticeable. It’s just quite a high contrast between the black shadow and the light coloured oak. There are a few other issues, but this is the only one which I think might be very expensive to fix. The grain pattern of the oak veneered doors is continuous as it’s been cut from one jumbo sheet of veneer (as specified in my drawing). So to fix it properly they would probably need to redo all 5 doors. A cheaper alternative, which I’m hoping is feasible, is to get them to redo the small door above the 8mm gap, and just make that door 5mm taller. The challenge will be to try and find some oak veneered that has a similar grain pattern so that they can edge match it to the shorter piece they would be replacing. The door which is 5mm too short is only 19cm tall, so a small proportion of the overall height of 305cm, so maybe a mismatched grain would be terrible for just that piece. But part of me thinks that this was an incredibly expensive bookcase, the most expensive thing in our whole house, and so I had pretty high expectations and worked on the drawings for MANY days and it has caused me some sleepless nights, so a bit disappointed. But also don’t want to fall out with these guys as they still have quite a bit of joinery to do for us and they have on the whole been really decent. @Big Jimbo I think you might be a joiner (?) so curious as to your thoughts on this sort of mistake, as well as everyone else‘s thoughts of course. SWMBO is also upset that four small brass hinges are visible above the short door, which neither of us were expecting.

@CloGanga, you also need a good family therapist or, worst case scenario, a good divorce lawyer. (Read my driveway story if you are confused.) But more seriously, given your driveway will be flat I don’t see an issue with gravel. If you go for the larger size stones (14mm to 20mm) they will be heavy enough that they shouldn’t move around much.

You know those awful stories about negligent surgeries when a surgeon removes the wrong limb/testicle/eye/breast… I wonder if there’s ever been a bulldozer that demolished the wrong house?! That one looked pretty good.