The Money Pit

We've Got Some Brass

Last week was the quarterly combination of the Swinderby and Newark antique fairs took place. Swinderby takes place on the Tuesday/Wednesday and Newark on the Thursday/Friday. We used to only go to Swinderby but now only got to Newark. They're only held a couple of miles apart and the lots of stall holders attend both, but we've found Newark to be of much better quality.

We went there - as usual - knowing what it is we wanted. Like with all shopping Karen likes to browse and buy on impulse, whereas I prefer to know what I want and just track that down. On this occasion I knew I needed a load of brass and knew exactly which stalls to visit to get it.

Here's the haul I came away with:

It's made up of:

Two brass reproduction finger-plates	£22
Two chrome-plated reproduction finger-plates for bathroom door	£22
Four coat hooks	£14
Four pairs of reproductions beehive door handles	£56
Eight original brass handles complete with "character"	£40
Sash window latch and lifting handle	£30
Chandelier hook	£16
Total	£200

To me this seems like a bit of a bargain to me. All of what I bought is solid metal and the two bags I came away were reassuringly weighty. I don't know how much it all would have cost had I bought elsewhere but I'm sure there's nowhere you can find it any cheaper. That's what I love about "Swinderby" (as we tend to call whichever one we go to).

If you haven't been before you really should check out what's available and how much cheaper it is than the shops. The next Newark fair is in February. Check the DMG website for more details.

Me, The Riparian Owner

A hand-delivered envelope came through the door just now. Addressed to "The Occupier" it almost went straight in the bin, but something made me think twice and open it up. Inside was a letter from the Environment Agency.

Apparently I am a "riparian owner" -- the owner of land that forms the bank of a watercourse. What shocked me was that the Ouse Dyke, which makes one side of our boundary, is classified as a "main river".

When does a hill become a mountain, a puddle a pond or a stream a river? Who knows! One thing I do know is that what we have running past our house is definitely not what I'd call a river and by no means a main river. It's a stream, if that. Although its actually called a dyke. Teehee.

The letter states that it's the agency's job to manage the flood risk, but that I too have responsibilities, which the letter sets out to summarise. More on that here -- "Living on the edge".

You can get an idea of what I'm talking about here. The dyke doesn't actually run through the garden, in that you can't actually see it or make a "water feature" of it. To get to it you have to take the ladders to the bottom of the garden and climb down the wall in to it.

Here it is after a particularly heavy down-pour:

Here's a photo of it about half a mile upstream looking back down towards us and the local church. 

Despite the alarming nature of the letter and learning I own land next to a main river and thus live in a flood risk zone, what made me take notice was the part where it states that I need special "consent" from the Environment Agency if I plan to build "any structure... ...on the bank of the watercourse".

It's as if they read my mind and knew my plans to knock down the garage and rebuild it. The picture below is a grab I took when I worked at our local county council. Dead centre is our garage. As you can see it's on the bank of the "river". Drat!

As if seeking the usual planning permission wasn't hassle enough I now need to talk to the environment agency too...

Fitting Radiators Above Tiled Floors

Tips on this site are like buses - wait ages then two come at once!

Today I want to share the method I came up with for drilling radiator pipe holes through our newly-tiled hall floor. This I managed with no damage to the tiles immediately surrounding the hole, which is always something to worry about. Here's how:

1. First thing to do is fix your rad to the wall

2. Find a piece of wood large enough for you to rest all your weight on with both knees and drill a hole in it (more on the hole in a mo)

3. Site the hole directly below the rad valve and mark the skirting to show where the board should line up with once you've removed the rad and are ready to drill. In the shot below I'm using a short piece of pipe that's just long enough to help line up the valve with the floor.

4. Do the same for the other side and remove the rad from the wall. Put the board back in its place and squirt some water in the hole. As you can see below I've hired a 30mm diamond-core drill bit and drill from a local hire shop. It can get warm so nice to try and water cool it.

5. With all your weight on the board you can start drilling. The whole idea of the board is to stop the drill slipping off in any directions and scraping the tiles. After a while you've got a "pilot" hole going and can remove the board and carry on without it. I'd suggest cleaning up as you and giving a fresh squirt of water as well. Don't try and wham the drill through in one go. Each hole took me about 1o minutes!

6. Once you're through the tile and glue (sorry, as Shaun "Tiler" Taylor says, "adhesive") you can remove the plug and there you have it - a hole. All you need now is a normal wood drill to finish the hole off through whatever's below the tiles (2" of plywood and chipboard in our case).

7. You're probably wondering why the 30mm hole for 15mm piping!? Well, 30mm is the smallest core drill the hire shop had. That's why the board has the large (32mm!) hole in it. But it's nice as it give us a bit of room to play with when it comes to plumbing time. I already knew I'd be covering the holes with collars (like below) so it's not an issue for me.

Et, voila!

Fixing Skirting To (Curved) Walls

There's a wall in our house that's has a slight curve in it. This hasn't caused me much bother at all really. Although I always knew it would when we did the hallway and I had to replace the skirting on said wall. Not something I was looking forward to at all. I've mentioned before how I hate doing skirting.

Well, when I took off the hundred year old skirting at the beginning of the hall project (more of which later) I noticed something about it:

At the end where the bend was they'd carefully cut a dozen or so slits in to the back of the board, which helps it bend a little easier. Until I saw this I don't know how I thought they might have done it. Gradual bending under the effect of steam maybe?

Anyway, that was months ago, but I made a point of remembering the trick as I knew at some point I'd have to put some board back on. That time came this weekend gone. Although I was replacing nine inch board with five I still thought it might help.

Here's the board after I'd added the slot and ready to be stuck to the wall:

Aside: Notice the tiled floor! This is the reason the skirting came off in the first place (I'd always wanted to avoid taking it off). More on the tiles and the floor, which was a massive project in itself, later!

To help hold the board to the curve of the wall I used three "sprags" as you can see below:

This is only really possible when the width of the room allows a piece of wood to span it.

It's at this point that I had added a load of grab-fast/no-nails/stick-like-shit/whatever-you-call-it to the back of the board. Whether or not I could have left this for a day or so before removing the sprags i don't know. I didn't want to find out though and decided to find a better way of securing to the wall.

The original skirting was attached with nails which were hammered through the board and in to a noggin of wood in a joint between the bricks behind. How on earth they ever managed this I don't know. I've tried in the past to do this and never had any luck.

The other method I've tried is to hold the board in place and drill through it and slightly in to the wall behind to mark where each hole was. With the board removed you can then drill and plug each hole before putting the board back in place and screwing to the wall. Getting all the holes to line up is a bit hit and miss though and not an approach I'm keen on.

What I did this time was try and new approach, which also drills the wall behind and plugs/screws though, but does so while the board is in place.

To do this you need the following:

• 7mm Rawl plugs
• 7mm wood drill
• 7mm masonry drill
• 10mm wood drill
• 10mm wood plugs
• Screw with a 10mm diameter head

With the board in place you then:

1. Drill 10mm holes in to the board (<=10mm deep) in the place you think you need to secure it.
2. Using these holes as markers drill 7mm holes right through the board.
3. Use the 7mm masonry bit to drill the whole in the wall behind (hoping at this point there's a brick there and not a joint).
4. Get the Rawl plug and bang it through the hole in the skirting and in to the wall behind. Use something 7mm or less in diameter to do this. I used a nail punch to help me.
5. Screw the board up using the screws. Because the screw has a 10mm head it will go in to the first hole but not through the 7mm inner hole!
6. Plug the outer hole.

In pictures:

The tools

Drilling the hole in the wall behind (with that reassuring site of red dust ;o):

Plugging the holes (This board is something Dad did for me using his plug cutters. Very useful to have. Thanks Dad!):

And there you have it. It's a little faffy but it's an easy way to get the board secured to the wall without any guess work or room for mistakes.

Putting Scrap Copper To Good Use

Last weekend marked the third anniversary of us moving in. During that time I've removed a fair amount of copper. Mainly because there was too much of it in the first place.

Most of it was taken away by the plumber who put the new boiler in. I thought he was doing me a favour at first until I realised the price of scrap copper had sky-rocketed recently.

Resisting the temptation to weigh-in the rest of the copper that came out I kept it all stored in the cellar. The plan was always that I'd create an arbour for the garden. This was always wishful thinking and I should have known I'd never have the time to. Luckily dad (retired) - who has all the time in the world - stepped in and did a much better job than I ever could have done.

As you can see from below it forms a gateway between the pond/lawn area and the path, which leads down to the bottom of the garden and the gazebo we added last summer.

Here's looking through the arbour, back to the house, from the top of the garden path.

I'd like to share more technical details of its construction but I didn't make it so I can't. It's about 7' tall and 4' wide. It's made up of about 6 pieces joined by many cross-pieces. The top of each was shaped around mum and dad's garden table, apparently.

So, before you go throwing away old copper just remember what you can do with it.

Well done and thank you dad!

Another DIY Blogger

Through the comments on this site I've stumbled upon another building/DIY blog. You can find it at PG Wake, which is linked to from his more general website at www.pgwake.co.uk.

This guy appears to know his stuff and having spent less than an hour there I've already learnt a couple of useful nuggets of information.

One entry on his blog that caught my attention was his guide to making your own curved windows. No need to tell you what's next on my list of side projects ;o) Well, ok, maybe there is. It's the porch and the starlight above the front door. Currently rectangular I'd love for it to be curved.

It's good to have another crafts blog to read.

Routing a Kitchen Draining Board

It's been about  two years since we did the kitchen. Since then my mental to do list has had on it "Route some drainage grooves in to the worktop. For various reasons (mostly that I didn't have the balls to) I've been putting this off until now. Eyes right and you'll see I managed to get it done.

At first I'd thought I'd need a jig to do this. The only one I could find was on Screwfix and cost £90. For something I'm only going to use once I couldn't bring myself to spend that much and have been looking for a cheaper alternative ever since.

Having not found one I decided there was only one thing left for it - take the advice given to me in this USENET post and make my own jig. Turns out it wasn't all that hard and was also fun to boot!

Here it is:

You can probably tell that it's made out of a piece of door frame casing I had left over. The two pieces are set apart by the exact width of my router and then were clamped and screwed and glued together with the bits of wood you see at each end.

On the under-side it looks like this:

 

The bits of plastic you see are joist spacers and are colour-coded by size. The red ones are 5mm high. The blues are 3mm and the yellow 1mm. The are spaced so as to give an even rise of 5mm over the 500mm length of the groove.

I'd setup the router beforehand so that at the far end of each groove it just touched the worktop. This means the grooves go from being 5mm deep to a nice flush finished where it come out at the other end.

In the photo above you can see Karen is standing on the other end. As we could only work in-situ this was my only way of "clamping" both ends.

Here's the work in progress:

Note that I'd worked out beforehand how to space them all and had started on the centre one before working outward in each direction.

All that was left to do was a light sanding and a few coats of Danish oil before it looked like this:

In a few months the sun will have darkened it to the match the surrounding wood and all we be good.

I write this blog post for a few reasons:

1. It's been way too long since the last entry and high time I started posting regular updates.
2. I want to show-off at what a clever boy I've been.
3. To help others. This is the main reason why and the reason I write most of what I write on the web. In doing this I couldn't find any other guide (no matter how short) on doing this. So, by writing this I hope somebody else will Google it one day it will give them the courage to do it for themselves. If I can do it, so can you.

Obviously this is a short entry and doesn't cover everything I did. What I should mention I did (and strongly advise you do) is practice. Practice, practice and then practice some more. I had an off-cut of the worktop that I could mess about with.

Do not try your jig out on your worktop until you're happy with it!

Good luck. Any questions, let me know.

Why The Boiler Died. Probably.

As a follow-up to the Dead Boiler post here's what I've worked out probably caused the problem.

As well as talking about it here I posted to the uk.d-i-y usenet group about it. One response talked about a boiler's fan going when the wall near the flue outlet was rendered and rubble made its way down the flue to the boiler. That hasn't happened to me, but something similar did.

Here's what our flue looks like:

Notice the elbow at the top is inline with the wall. Since then I've swivelled it round to be at about 30^o to the wall as the steam was making the wall damp and I feared long-term damage.

What I think has happened is that driving rain has entered the flue and made its way down to the fan, where it's shorted the circuits or some other damage was caused. The reason I think this happened is that on the morning it went there was a puddle beneath the boiler. Also I've noticed small damp patches there in the past. I've even seen it drip once or twice from within the main body of the boiler. Obviously last Wednesday night there was a storm and the rain was at the right angle to flood the fan. The more I think about the more it makes sense.

Next time it rains I'll keep an eye on it and see what happens. In the long run I need to change the flue to point downwards.

It was an expensive lesson to learn as it cost £160 to have the plumber who installed it fix the new fan. Not sure whose fault it was though. Is it a design fault or was it the installer's fault for not positioning the flue right? I'm surprised more boilers don't suffer the same fate.

Dead Boiler

Remember a year and a half ago we had a new boiler installed? Well, yesterday (my birthday!) we woke to find it had died. Completely. Not just a lack of hot water but the control panel and warning light were gone too. Doesn't take a genius to work out the PCBs have had it.

My first call was to the manufacturers, Glow-Worm, who, it appears, couldn't care less that it's winter and we're at home looking after a one month old baby with no heating and unable to wash either ourselves or his nappies.

Although I rang them on Thursday the soonest they could get an engineer out to look at it was going to be Wednesday. Six days without heating or washing?

So, I called the plumber who originally installed it and he offered to help out, as he knows people at Glow Worm and could probably get the bits off them. As far as I know he's doing the best he can to get this done ASAP. He's a nice bloke.

In the mean time I have a Glow Worm engineer booked in for next Tuesday (they managed to get one a day earlier in the end). The phone operator couldn't however give me any guarantee that he'd be able to fix it on the day or that he'd have the right PCB with him. This despite my telling them what model it is and that the problem is almost definitely with the PCBs. You'd think he might come with everything he might need and I live in hope.

The boiler itself is under warranty, but, as it's in the second year, only parts are covered and there's a £105 charge for labour! This to fix a £900 boiler that's less than two years old. Needless to say I'm a little pissed off about the whole thing.

If this were a Sky+ box on the blink I wouldn't be bothered about when an engineer could get out to see me. But this is a boiler. Something you take for granted until it's gone. Our well-being depends on it. It makes me wonder how many engineers Glow Worm have. Is it a team of dedicated people or one man who makes his way round the East Midlands as fast as he can!? You'd like to think that there'd be some urgency about matters concerning boilers in the winter where newborn babies are concerned. Obviously not though. You'd like to think the reply would be "We'll have somebody with you within the hour sir!" ala RAC-style roadside recovery. Instead you get a couldn't-care-less attitude from a company only to ready to make you wait and profit from it all in the end anyway.

The one blessing in all this is that we're saving a heap of money on the gas we're not using ;o)

Shower In Use, Finally

After a month or so of me having Karen's second-hand bath water every night we finally got the shower back in use last week and I can stop worrying about how much hot water we're using each day.

The shower we went for has enclosed controls and a fixed 8" head sticking out of the wall above, which makes it a bit like standing in a monsoon. Here the controls panel:

Couldn't be simpler could it. It's not even as complicated as it might look. You turn it one way for on and the other for off. The further you turn it in the on direction the warmer it gets. Unscrew for hot. Screw for off.

There's a reason I wanted a simple shower control and that stems from using overly-complicated showers when visiting other people's houses. You know the ones? It's the normally the electric shower variety that have not only an on/off button and temperature control but also a hi/lo control. The idea of it all makes sense but the practice is never so simple. Half the time in somebody elses shower is normally spent trying to get less than a trickle at anything other than freezing or scaulding.

You can always bet the shower's owner knows exactly which combination of settings gets the best results and could probably show you how to achieve this. However, I'd like not to have to show people how to use the shower. A shower shouldn't need a demo and I'm happy ours doesn't.

The control/valve and shower head are both from Victoria Plumb.