Ferdinand

There are also various power tools perhaps left from last week, including Impact Drivers and Cordless Drills, and esorerics such as Dry Lining Sanders.

Even water butts can be lethal if care is not taken. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378827/Gardener-drowns-falling-ladder-landing-head-water-butt.html

Out of interest for anyone who commented on this thread, this is a site video of our new gym a couple of days ago. Have temporarily stuck the video on Vimeo. You may want to scan through it. It lost the sound along the way, however. The password is "hexis" F

I prefer: "If you were me, you would..." The slogan on that mug is a remarkable piece of the printers art. It has been done to look exactly as if photoshopped without adjusting the text to be a curve when photographed. Impressive.

I hadn't considered this, and I do sometimes lend my mini mixer to people. Thanks.

Aren’t they just the cheapest posh-looking ones? Thpugh I had a good reason too ... needed my shorter openings to look taller.

That’s the wrong one :-). it is actually an sbses7252, which is different. I have whinged about incomprehensible appliance codes designed to be untellable-apart before. It is the ghost of Harvey J Earl wreaking a terrible revenge on consumers for making him sell them all those boringly structured ranges of cars. An SBSES7252 consists of a SKES4210 fridge and an SGNES3010 freezer, plus a gubbins to hold them together as a single unit. It is an ex-showroom model that is not available any more, and hence is being sold off (“Make Us an Offer”). ”Make Us an Offer” turned out to mean Above the Lowest Price we will Accept ! Thanks all. I have placed my order and it arrives later this week. This is the beast: This is the other one. As you can see they are entirely different. Ahem.

Surely that is how they count identical sheep?

I am just off to look at an ex-display Liebherr American Fridge-Freezer model SBSES 7252, which is reduced significantly for clearance. I think this may be the midrange one ie £2.8k rather than £1k or £5k, and does not have the gimmicks like an ice machine, but I think has the good basic stuff such as drawers which can turn into shelves, and a good life during powercuts. The docs say it weighs 179kg, which sounds a little threatening, but I believe it comes as 2 separate units with with separate compressors etc and a thing that makes it look like one. The reduced cost will be about the same as a decent Siemens fridge + a decent Siemens freezer, and the current ones are fridge approx 14 years old and freezer approx 25 years old. Can anyone comment - worth having? Ferdinand

Indeedy. The banana was split some years ago. (Better go and do something useful)

Are there equally good slightly smaller Dewalts?

Looking at those numbers, I would say that some of them should be reducible by perhaps a quarter to a third .. based on the areas Inknow about, but God and the Devil are both in the Detail here. On the doors etc, we have for £5742: And Declan said My recent experience, on the LBB for 6 doors and skirting throughout, came to around £90 per door for getting the heavy Oak Veneer Mexicano doors, ball bearing hinges, wing handles and tube latches bought and delivered per door. All good quality. The doors were about £70 of that, but the deal was very good and might be a bit more next time. Others are reporting numbers around £100 for similar oak veneer doors and furniture in a recent thread so that should be doable in the £100 ballpark. If you are using white egg crate doors or similar then you should be under half that. If you go for cheap doors consider better door furniture that you can reuse with better doors later. Fitting for me was about £80-100 per door including quite a bit of trimming to match existing frames. Note that this only included forming one doorframe. I paid £1.60 inc VAT per metre for 94mm bullnose pre-primered skirting. Buying that is a minor cost. Painting and trimming and attaching skirting will be more significant (probably glue it on). Obvs buy it in lengths and a selection that are slightly more than your varied room dimensions eg 4.2m for me -> no joins but go 2 feet too long for joins and corners rather than risk 1 foot too short. Get it all at once and get the calculations right or you may get another delivery fee for the small second order which is under the free delivery threshold. This latter is meat and drink; same principles apply everywhere. 4-5m skirtings in small hatchbacks can be done, but needs care ! Door linings, once the openings are formed, could be £30 depending on circs. I paid £25 for a white MDF 108mm version, but my supplier now advertises these at £54 - so it must have been a sale or to clinch the order. On that basis I would punt that you should look for your doors, skirtings and architraves to be somewhere under 4K, perhaps nearer 3.5k. procured and fitted. Paint the skirtings and architraves before fitting, and spray your walls first if they are being sprayed. F

This is one for the new PM to demonstrate authority in a manner which will be gentle but firm and resolute !!!

Are we doing Physics? Definitions of relativity, then. My favourite two: 1 - If you run fast enough into a 6 foot shed with a 7 foot ladder, it will fit. 2 - Essex. F

Some of those items look interesting and very round numbers. How soon do these need to be implemented? Do we have time to crunch them properly? That driveway, and then the plastering, are interesting for a start. To me, if that is all the electric components and fitting all the electrics, then that looks OK, but the plastering looks expensive for a small house unless it includes plasterboarding too. I think we need a breakdown by one more level of subtasks and time tbh. F

@laurenco Take note of this if you need to remove the condition for the Phase 2 without jeopardising the whole shebang.

In a place that size from cold it will take some time to heat the walls and foundations and so on before stabilising. It could easily be a couple of weeks or more. F

Maybe a small or irrelevant note, but is there value in protecting this from the cooker end? eg by fitting an MCB or trip of some sort for if it risks going over the cable limit. Then you just turn one off and continue. If it only happens at Christmas or a couple of times a year, that may be viable. Fixing the cable is the better way, but if that is very difficult...

Of course, though I thought it was a bit tortured, especially for the walrus.

It’s like a 70s porno mag updated for the Waitrose Generation: picture features of Readers’ Homes.

It depends how good your fabric is. If you only need a tea light for 3 minutes AM and PM to heat the whole house, then the extra rooms cost 3p a year each to heat, and buggering about with doors and temperatures (and complicated control gear) is as useful for your welfare as counting nose-hairs on a live walrus by plucking them out one by one with tweezers. If otoh your house is more like mine ie probably at about 2010 Regs Level then there may well be fewer losses (ie more than nearly zero) by a slightly more traditional heating strategy. I tend to use a practice somewhere between the two. (It is Saturday and I enjoyed a large Jack Daniels with my after dinner coffee, and I deny all responsibility for things I may say).

Unfortunately I have been reading Shakespeare quotes on bathrooms:

(Lowered tone warning to delicate blossoms) Magazine loo roll dispensers - presumably something like the LRB - were not necessary in a pre-loo-roll era when no one wore knickers or underpants. In 1562 your bathroom would have been finished by now since it would comprise a duckpond and a wall. I just managed to lower the tone on @Onoff ! Woohoo.

If people insist on bathrooms that look like the inside of an Elizabethan Dovecote, then there is price to be paid in blood and treasure...

I think many of us probably turn our heating off completely for between 5 and 9 months each year. Last year mine was off from about April to September. I think others with more insulation do it March to October. This spring was a little unusual :-o . I run my main thermostat downstairs at about 21, and upstairs at about 18 in my room and 20 in mum’s via TRVs. Bathroom underfloor on for a bit in the morning for warm tootsies, and the other bedroom upstairs relies on open doors or gaps thereunder unless someone is coming to stay. For most of the time all this is on a few longish time clock periods per day say 4 hours morning, lunchtime and evening to allow the ufh temp to be low. When it goes below zero I either put it on 247, or turn the flow temperature up, or some combination of the two. Others differ markedly. Ferdinand