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Practical exercise in what can go wrong with ladders, if you don't listen to your head telling you it's stupid to do something. Yesterday my wife was out and it was raining, so decided to clean the inside of the upper windows of our lounge, approx 6m high. Our flooring is down and it's a waxed finished oak. So moved chairs and nest of glass side tables out of the way of the ladder. The glass table were still under the ladder. Cleaned the upper part of the windows ok and reduced the ladder height to approx 2.0m, proceeded to climb ladder no problems, when at the top, the feet of the ladder slipped on the wooden floor, me and the ladder came crashing down one the glass side tables. The tables broke in thousand pieces, but many large shards of glass remained. Lucky for me I only had small cuts all over my legs and quite a few bruises, it could have been a lot worse if I had landed differently. Back to working today, so can't be too bad. Learning of the story 1. Think, if it all goes wrong where will I land. 2. Ladders and waxed surfaces do not mix. 3. If your head says it's not a good idea - it may not be. 4. It maybe a good idea to have someone around when you are up a ladder, in case it all goes badly and they can call for help. 5. Think can I use an extension pole and not a ladder.

I've only just realised that my architect designed our plumbing layout in such a way that the boiling water tap in our "drinks station" corner of the kitchen does not have a waste pipe. We had never intended to have the boiling water tap over the kitchen sink, as we rather have a separate drinks station, but I just assumed there would be a tiny sink or at least a drip tray that fed into a waste pipe. The reason providing a waste pipe is tricky is that we would have to route it through a sound proofed wall and that would lessen the soundproofing. Is this a problem? There is plenty of space under the worktop where the boiling water tap is mounted both for the boiler unit and a large container to catch drips. So i could have a 300ml drip tray sunk into the worktop and if that's not big enough i could also drill through that and link it with a pipe to a bigger container in the base unit below. I would then just have to remember to empty that container, but that shouldn't be a problem as it's right by the coffee machine which I need to empty every few days anyway. I'm more concerned that a BCO might object to it not having a waste pipe. Is that a legitimate concern?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-45450278 Television wildlife presenter Johnny Kingdom has been killed in an accident on his land. The film-maker, photographer and author, who specialised in his local area of Exmoor and north Devon, died on Thursday night. Police confirmed emergency services were called to a field near Wadham Cross in Knowstone, Devon, to reports that a digger had rolled over.

Building on the content of this topic on connecting LED strip lighting drivers to the mains, a little bird whispered in my ear, loud enough for me to worry ( - overthink - Ok @Russell griffiths ? ) about where I can / should / may /may not / would / could / oughtn't to / may / am permitted to place the drivers. You know, those things that are called drivers, but are transformers really. Thinking about fire regulation, are there any rules where they may not be placed ? Of course, it makes sense to place them in an accessible place for maintenance reasons - but what about ceiling spaces where sound insulation might increase their working temperature. Can I bury one in some of the over-abundance of insulation that exists in my front wall?

Sometimes it's essential. Especially when you are working on your own. I'm just too tired to do what I need to within the time ' ... allowed ...' Do we set ourselves unrealistic ' ... targets ... ' as self-builders ? Just imagine if we were entirely realistic and accurate in target setting : there'd be no need for procrastination

Thought it might be useful to detail an accident that happened on our site during the main construction if only to prevent others from having a similar issue. I'm sure that we must have done some things wrong here, but there were others to blame in this tale too, and the events that unfolded seemed very bizarre to me. We used a registered scaffolding company to hire the scaffolding from and this was erected in August 2009. It was used for several months to do all of the main construction work and then towards the end of its time here someone fell off it. We used a particular builder to do all of the timber frame work, he supplied his own workers, and we paid him (and only him), in cash as he requested. We never paid any money directly to his team members. Towards the end of 2009 he sent a new guy here to do some work on the soffits and he arrived along with one of the regular team (the boss wasn't on site that day which wasn't that unusual as it was often just members of his team). The OH was living in a caravan on site at that time so greeted the 2 guys, one of whom he knew quite well as he had been working here for several months. He offered them tea and bacon rolls as he tended to do most mornings and went into the caravan to sort that out. About 10 minutes after they arrived there was a shout and the new guy had apparently fallen from the first level of the scaffolding landing on his arse (see photo to see the height of the first platform for reference). His co worker hadn't seen him fall and nor had my hubby who was in the caravan at the time. He was lying on the ground so my hubby called an ambulance. He said that the guy then got up, staggered to his car, put on his hi vis jacket and hard hat and sat in his car. When the ambulance arrived they suggested that he shouldn't have got into his car, and that they might get the fire brigade out to remove the roof in case he had damaged his neck. The guy refused their help at that point, said he wasn't having his car wrecked, and drove home. My husband reported the accident to the scaffolding company whereupon the owner drove to the site and attached an insurance certificate to the scaffolding dated that day. He said that the scaffolding wasn't signed off to use prior to that date even though it was hired back in August, several months before and had been used pretty much daily. Clearly he hadn't insured the site as he should have done. Health and Safety came to the site too and declared that some 'clips' were missing from the scaffolding, and put a notice on it declaring it not to be used. The scaffolding company came and put the clips on and it was then signed off as able to be used again. Apparently later that day the guy who fell off went to A&E and declared that he had hurt himself badly. He then engaged a no win no fee solicitor and took himself off to Australia to 'convalesce' or so he claimed. We reported the accident to our insurance company, and stated that the worker had been supplied by the contractor who was erecting the timber frame, and the scaffolding was supplied by the registered scaffolding company. The first issue we had was that the builder denied having supplied the worker. This left us with an issue as our insurance company said that we couldn't prove that the worker came via the main builder, and nor could we prove that we hadn't employed him direct. The scaffolding company collected the scaffolding and put themselves into liquidation meaning that the no win no fee lawyer came after us. My husband had to make statements and years later it was still going on with any settlement the insurance company was prepared to make reducing as time went on. It all seemed quite bizarre to us however that it was our insurance cover that was being claimed against when there were 2 other parties involved. In hindsight we should probably have taken a register of every person on site and who they were supplied from, and required every worker to sign in when they attended. We possibly should have known that scaffolding had to have an insurance certificate attached to it, but we believed that hiring from a registered company would have meant that we were completely covered as they would do the right things. Ironically my husband had refused to hire the scaffolding from anywhere other than a registered scaffold company in order to comply with H&S, but ultimately it did us no good!

The caravan is here! My question is do we need an LPG registered gas engineer to connect up to the two 47kg LPG units? And what about when we need to change them? Or can we do this ourselves (the pigtails are already on the end of the caravan and the boiler has been serviced before we got it). For interest, the shed (ex-playhouse) to the right hand side is the outside toilet cum laundry. Fitting it out has kept him indoors happily occupied for a good couple of weekends.....

Some may remember that when I burned out my faithful and very old Black and Decker circular saw (which must have been over 20 years old), when finishing off our bamboo flooring, I made a stupid purchasing decision and went down to Screwfix and bought a large Erbauer as a replacement. My reason for buying the Erbauer (apart from the price) was that it took the same big blades as my mitre saw, and as I had a fair few mitre saw blades I thought there was some logic in having the same size. The Erbauer in question is this one: http://www.screwfix.com/p/erbauer-erb596cws-2000w-235mm-circular-saw-240v/71604 The problem is that it's far to big and heavy to use most of the time, so I went and bought a Makita cordless saw, which is a great bit of kit. As a consequence, the big Erbauer has just sat in it's box for a couple of years, doing nothing except being moved about from one storage location to another. One really nice feature about this saw is that the base plate is a bit of 3mm alloy plate, screwed to all the rest of the stuff. This means that it will be dead easy to just make a new plate that could be set into a saw table, retaining all the angle and depth settings of the original (albeit with the need to bend under the table to get at the handles to move things). Having looked around the web, there are lots of ideas around for making table saws, BUT, there is also what looks to be a safety "war" between US and UK builders of these things. Most UK sites condemn the US practice of having no riving knife with attached safety guard; most US sites tend to suggest the safety guard and riving knife is a pain and limits flexibility and ease of use. I can't see an easy way to fit either a riving knife or safety guard when I fit this thing under a table. I can't use the existing guard, as that would mean leaving a very wide blade slot, and that's more dangerous than not having a guard, as stuff can get thrown up around the blade or jam it. So, I'm proposing to go down the US route, and have just the blade coming out of a narrow slot. I can't see that it's any more dangerous than running a slit saw or flycutter in a milling machine, TBH, and think it just needs to be treated with respect. I will fit a no-volt switch and big E stop button. So, what's the collective view on how mad an idea this is, and has anyone here done something similar?

In the event of a fire, there is a need to extract smoke on BOOST and stop supplying fresh air - how can this be done when a smoke alarm goes off? Can there be a form of Spring closing flap or fire damper on the inlet, triggered by the fire alarm?