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Hi everyone! I'm a DIY enthusiast who's just bought their first house and is looking forward to starting multiple projects! I'm hoping for some advice on my first project. I've recently bought a new house (terraced, Victorian) and was delighted to discover pine floorboards beneath the carpets. My excitement was short lived when I realised that the depth of the boards is only 16mm. Am I correct that at 16mm, these boards are already too thin to sand down before refinishing?

Hi. I'm hoping someone can offer some assistance please. I have a front driveway which is approx 14m x 14m. It is currently on a slope and I am planning to build a retaining wall with oak sleepers. The wall will be 1.1m high and will be 2 tiered, like steps. I am going to have 2 trenches for each wall with a horizontal sleeper used as posts in concrete behind each wall. In the trench will be DPC material and then some form of aggregate with then concrete added to make a flat base. I want to sit the sleepers on their narrowest side, 100mm. I will connect the sleepers with wooden dowels for extra strength. To reinforce the walls, I will run deadmen/t-bar reinforcements every 8ft along every row and every other row in height. I will also be laying a French drain behind both walls leading to a dry well at either end of the wall. I have attached images of a very rough diagram to illustrate this with also my driveway currently and how i want the wall to look like. My questions are: 1. How deep should my trenches be and how much of the 1st sleeper should be below ground level? 2. How should I attach the 1st row of sleepers to the base? Rebar or coaches or something else? 3. Can I feed the perforated drain pipe around the horizontal posts? Will that not affect water flow? 4. Is having the 2nd wall 6 sleepers high too much? Will it be secure with the deadmen/ t-bar reinforcements? 5. Should I be connecting the sleeper rows with wooden dowels or perhaps rebar instead? 6. Would corner metal brackets add to reinforce or are overkill? Also, please feel free to offer me any guidance, or let me know I'm on the right track(!). I hope the above makes sense!

Well today was a bit of a milestone for my extension project as the structural engineer has approved the existing foundations and walls which is great, I guess in a way that's us now out of the ground albeit the next stages are demolition. So here is the story, you may know from my other post there is a garage being built, well it will once planning comes through, planning is joint with this extension - planning didn't assign our application to an officer and well that was 10 weeks ago! It will be with me in 4 to 5 weeks I am told! Oh good! So the build is an existing sunroom being converted into a proper room which will become the kitchen - our back garden is about 1500 below floor level so the sunroom was obviously built up to match FFL in the existing house, so there are decent founds and a good going block cavity wall, so my plan was to reuse all of this. My architect put in my building control application at the same time as the planning and it seems to be going slightly more smoothly. The BCO came back and asked for a certification for the founds, the SE visited tonight and has confirmed he will be happy to write to BC and confirm they are suitable for my proposed build and gave me some good tips and advice on how to do some bits and pieces - one of them was based on a suspicion that the existing floor joists are held up by joist hangers fixed to the inner block wall - this leaf will be demolished to top of joist level anyway as the timber frame will sit partially on the block and the rest on the timber frame, if hangers have been used he advised for the sake of 15 or so joists I should demolish the inner block wall down an additional block and run new joists over the top of the wall so it sits on it rather than hangs from it so that the loading is not such that it is trying to tip the block inwards. Made sense to me and is something I can easily do myself and I don't mind having to remove the joists because they will work perfectly as studs if they are OK or if a bit rough in the garage build. So I am expecting BC approval very soon and hopefully the build can commence mid to late August once planning consent is granted. So I am starting to think about the build and how I will do it, my plan is to get the existing Sun Room removed and get the walls demoed to the various heights etc. myself, and make good any bits and pieces, I will also then be able to either confirm the joists are fine or run in new ones. Then I was going to build the timber frame myself, I am very confident about the actual building, but my issue is experience of BC approved practises and accepted methods, once I am happy with these through talking to you guys, my architect and my structural engineer it won't be an issue, I just need to check and double check all my dims and make sure it's all spot on, so herein the first question, the frame will sit against the original house in two places, do I run a piece of DPM between the house and the first stud then fasten the stud to the house with the same fixings as speced for the roof beam? I cannot actually see a detail for this anywhere, I assume it gets tied into the existing wall? Once I build the frame I assume I can then just fix my wall plate and lay in my joists - now here is the second question, I asked for 2 skylights in the roof, I looked at the drawings at the time on a mobile as I was on business and said yeah looks fine, mistake! My architect didn't include the skylights, so how can I get these in now that the BCO is about to approve the drawings... Can I email him after approval and discuss - I would say I will sister the beams either side and affix the tie beam in with all the correct metalwork. Do you think he will accept it at that and let me go for it? What is the script with variations with BC. Thanks