Ferdinand

Or gravel.

We are nearly finished, The garden wall just needs a little more brick acid and wire brush treatment. The dustbin shelter needs one more course then a top of tiles and a tidy up. And one of a bit more of the hard landscaping. F

What was that sentence?

Like it. Did you manage the build two, sell one, then be mortgage free trick? I found a picture of the inside.

I would think the vendor would tell you that ... technical department?

Surely it will be "100% rebuild value" or buy the equivalent.

Not sure about that. London Buy-to-Let is very marginal. Here, as a traditional BTL, the flat would be around £300k when renovated (say 275k to purchase). If they bought it now 3.75k stamp duty + 10k Osborne Tax. Rent is £25k / year. 10% void = 22.5k. If they got that that is an exceptional yield for a London property. Normally you would have to spend perhaps £500k on a property to get to that rent level. Minus another 12-15% if under management. Mortgage of £200k would at todays prices have an interest rate equivalent of say 3.5% (rolling setup fees of about 2.5-3k in) = 7k pa. In K&C Council Tax is low - Band D is about £1000. Ignore as currently incident on the tenant. Service charge. Guessing a little - perhaps £2k a year which is cheap for London, but may have been huge following the refurb. Plus they will need to budget another 1k or so for insurance, gas safety etc. And perhaps 1-2k for maintenance and investment. Plus the opportunity cost of interest on 100k of capital which could be 3-5% elsewhere = say 3k. Which leaves gross profit at around 8-9k a year, which is profitable but not really a killing. Or 5-6k if using a managing agent. And in 4 years the mortgage interest will be treated as income for higher rate taxpayers. It would be much better if owned outright, or much worse if in a Borough like Southwark or Newham where there is a lot more bureaucracy. F

@craig I think you will be fine. 11 likes on 30 posts is a good start. We just need a tot of brandy. F

Good luck.

They will have the numbers from somewhere but may misquote, cannot add up if written by Arts graduates, and do not cite. Decent bloggers more reliable. On Twitter it is very much a mixture, John Band and Unity who wrote the Ministry of Truth blog have been reliable nonsense debunkers for a decade. One myth that is perhaps about to collapse are the claims about empty foreign owned flats in London that the current Mayor campaigned on and Mr Corbyn wants to confiscate for refugees from Glenfell Tower. Mayor Sadiq commissioned a report from LSE which seems to be about to report that there basically aren't any left as empty land banks .. less than 1% of foreign bought homes: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/house-prices/almost-no-evidence-london-homes-owned-foreign-buyers-left-empty/ and on the lse website Yesterday. http://lselondonhousing.org/2017/06/overseas-investors-and-londons-housing-market/ The report for the London Mayor was dated 2017 May https://www.london.gov.uk/moderngovmb/documents/s58640/08b2b LSE Overseas Investment report.pdf But Mr Corbyn made his demand to requisition the non-existent empty homes yesterday, but should have had access to the report http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-40285994 And I have been hearing people talking about requisitioning these homes on R5 this morning. But 5-10 years of political campaigning against a non existent groups of foreigners vanishes into thin air. My conclusion is that a lot of statements get made regardless of available evidence, and that is essential to look at the original data. Please to check and tell me if I am wrong. There is also the slight problem that these people claim to believe in the Human RIghts Acts which forbids confiscation of property without a major legal process. IMO it is pretty much all popularise politics. Ferdinand

Eg in Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4609334/Fireproof-cladding-Grenfell-cost-5k-more.html Indy quotes 24 vs 22 ukp per sqm over 2000sqm. Neither is is a reliable source though. Indy pushed the fake cladding chosen to give rich people nice views line, which set off the Twitter trolls. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grenfell-tower-cladding-fire-cause-improve-kensington-block-flats-appearance-blaze-24-storey-west-a7789951.html Only the inflammatory headline appears on Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/Independent/status/875003261849399297 and is now reporting people repeating versions of the line http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/akala-grenfell-tower-fire-people-died-poor-london-rapper-block-flats-deaths-kensington-a7790906.html F

I think I have seen numbers around the difference between the non flammable and flammable versions being 2% and the cost being 200k. Those numbers which may be wrong give 4K.

I have seen criticism of building regs starting, in conversations about how people who followed the rules may not be able to be prosecuted.

I hadn't realised that the organisation responsible for running the Housing Stock in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the "KCTMO", which is one of two organisations under the cosh here (the other being RBKC itself), has a majority of tenants / leaseholders on its Board of Directors. I assume this is the standard for Arms Length Management Organisations. Ferdinand

Aiui single stairs are a standard design in larger buildings being built now, because a single stair in a concrete core is a safe design - convincing fire expert on the news describing where he lives. Design issues are perhaps more likely to be eg smoke exclusion or that the refurbishment had rendered the existing fire strategies inappropriate. F

Wondering whether a sprinkler system would have stopped this, as an outside-in fire. Observing a politician on the box creating space to talk about cuts tomorrow.

True. Fairly weak original story. Plus editing the existing page, or replacing it with a "we were not involved" statement, would be 10 times better than just removing it and leaving a hole.

Knauf have clarified that it was an "industry news" story on their website, and they were *not* the supplier. The perils of using other people's news to pad out your website !

Quite interesting tweets and retweets on John Band's Twitter Feed, @johnb68 John is a sensible, cynical, Ozzie journalist. He usually does the necessary digging. Seems that the actual cladding company did a pre-pack bankruptcy soon afterwards: http://www.constructionenquirer.com/2015/09/14/cladding-firm-harley-curtain-wall-pre-packed/ F

Been listening to the breakfast news coverage in the background, and I have yet to hear anything that I think gets above "inane". Piers Morgan declaring "it is extraordinary that in modern Britain .... xyz". No it isn't, Piers - design errors and mistakes get made. Various perambulations around the alleged dodginess of "stay put" fire protection policy (as recommended by the people who know in the official guidance documents after balancing the risks against general panic etc). Just waiting for an expert to tell them to shut up and stop scaring people just to fill space. Probably (and I am sure everyone here will) treat that blog with a degree of caution. It has a Green Ink feel, and they are given to startling jumps. eg Before the para Jeremy quotes, it says: Or this piece where the refusual to temporarily unfence a fenced-off of a tree (presumably for protection etc) causes them to make comparisons to various genocides. One of the possible moments of levity in this business will be when media doesn't check properly and reports the Green Ink stuff as news. (Add: I have seen mention of an alleged "exploding fridge".) Ferdinand

What are the rules on Kwikstage or CupLok? If A Selfbuilder of Lower-Spiegelei-under-Bratkartoffel puts up some Kwikstage, can third party workers use it under HS regs etc without any certification, and is the self-builder's insurance still valid if eg the Batman or the Roofer falls off the scaffolding due to incorrect assembly and breaks his neck on an inconvenient breezeblock? Is the self-builder required to have a scaffolder qualification or employ someone qualified to build and certify it? (Aside - we had a large amount of real CupLok purchased in around 198x used for renovating a Victorian Mill, and then for other building jobs, of which I sold the last on ebay in about 2012 - still perfectly sound. I did not sell the planks, however.) Ferdinand

@Triassic I think @Cpd might have it. Do we need to reinvent the concept of the back porch as a well ventilated shaded low humidity space, perhaps with a dark cupboard or shaded racking for veg? Veg racks in there would combine well with eg bike storage. Even if there are building line issues (eg side door on a corner plot) porches of a couple of square sqm are permitted development. Or the garage? My normal reason for not putting potatoes in the fridge (we keep them in our north corridor, which is the same temp as the garage) has been because we have bought a couple of sacks of tatoes in the late autumn to last to the spring - so they won't fit. Ferdinand

Thanks for the further detail @JSHarris F

Dogs hmmm. I would want a trial for a couple of years. The issue I see with directly bonded bamboo is that if something doesn't work to get it back up again you will need the tenaciousness of someone demolishing an Eqyptian pyramid with hand tools. I could be wrong - have not tried it, but I have the impression @JSHarris thinks it is there to stay. The other alternative for Plan B is to have something ready to go on top if your bamboo fails, or get one that can be sanded back and refinished. Can strand woven bamboo be sanded? This is very much about 10-12 years time and how easy or not it is to bring back to as-new condition after those years of dog-abuse. People I know with umpteen dogs have tended to go for relatively-inexpensive laminate and replace every few years, by which time it is dog-tired ( !). Personally if I were putting something down to stay likely to get dogs galloping around it would be refinishable multiple times or hard tiles such as porcelain or quarry. That will have thicker dogs such as red setters skating around like toddlers on ice, but should outlast them. Ferdinand

Slightly surprised you aren't making your own :-)