The Money Pit

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.

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.

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.

Tap as Switch

Remember me talking about flow switches and extractor fans recently?

Well, (insert drum roll here) please allow my faithful assistant to demonstrate the use of the hot water tap as an electrical switch (no way I was going to test it mysefl ;o *)

Not an ideal demonstration as having the sink tap turn on a fan and shower light is fairly pointless. In use the fan/light will come on when you turn the shower on (unless having a cold one for some reason) or run a bath and will continue running for ten minutes or so. As a side effect it also comes on when you wash your hands in the sink. To get round this will mean more pipework and I'm yet to decide if I can be bothered. It might be nice to have the extractor fan come on if you're washing your hands after dropping the kids off at the pool. Either way I can't help thinking it's fairly impressive having this interaction between plumbing and electrics.

Anyway, in case some of you want to mimic this setup, here's how. You need a shower extractor fan (I went for the Vent Axia Luminair T (for timer)) and a flow switch (I got the 615 model off this page).

With the flow switch plumbed in to the hot water supply run the cable up to the loft space, where you have the extractor fan installed and a spare wire from the lighting cicuit available. It's now a simple case of connecting the mains, the switch and the fan together. I say simple, but in fact it took me ages to work this out in my head and a phone call to the switch manufacturer. As I expected, it is quite simple, but takes some figuring out. The easiest way to do this is to think of the flow switch as a normal wall light switch. Although the flow switch has three wires - a common and two "neutrals" labbeled N.O and N.C for "normally open/closed". In the diagram below you can see I've connected the open neatral to the live connector on the fan (marked Ls for live from switch).

It's a bit messy as I just wanted to get it up and running to test it actually worked. Hopefully it's clear enough to see how it works though. Any questions let me know.

* This is, of course, a joke. I'd never let my pregnant wife test this without having done so mysefl beforehand. What kind of man do you take me for!?

Bathroom First Fit Complete

After what feels like weeks of working every waking hour on the bathroom it's now at the point where I can leave it alone for a couple of days and catch up on life.

The trouble with the bathroom as a project is that you can't waste any time in getting it finished. It needs a quick turnaround. Especicially when you live with two girls. For a while the only toilet in the house was the one downstairs, which has no door and is basically in the hallway. Not ideal. There was also a period where we were having sponge baths stood at the kitchen sink, having to get other people to rinse our hair with measuring jugs.

This is all over now and we can toilet, wash and scrub teeth in the bathroom, which now looks like this (image on right is as it was when we first viewed the house):

It's far from finished but it now functions as a bathroom and I can relax for a while. I consider this the "first fit" where I get things in place and eliminate leaks and problems. I now have a lot of "boxing in" to do and the shower to fit.

The room itself looks pretty much the same as before - in that everything's in the same place. We made several improvements though, such as removing the false sealing and all the plastic cladding around the window. The door has moved out in to the corridor to make more space as well as the partition wall moving 6". All in all I think it makes a much bigger-feeling room.

The room has been dragged from the 80s (the bath was stamped May 1986 on the underneath!) in to the noughties. The feel is very much retro Victorian and is very much "now". Whether this look will date any time soon I don't know. Let's hope not.

There are more photos here. One of the photos is of Karen (legs in pop socks) trying the bath on for size in InSitu. This was almost a year to the day ago. Since then we've been buying all the bits needed for the project and storing them about the house. The idea being to spread the cost and soften the blow. Now we've got all the expensive part out of the way I've been wondering what the total cost was, which I'll try and work out roughly now:

• Bath and sink : £1100
• Taps: £200
• Toilet: £750
• Tiled floor: £120
• Plasterer: £400
• Shower (including basin and enclosure): £500
• Lights: £160
• Fixtures and fitting: £400
• Sundries: £500
• Total: £4100

Not cheap by any means, but far less than we could have spent on achieving the same result. As ever our approach has not been to cut any corners but to source decent quality stuff at a good price. It's amazing how much cheaper things become when you shop round and know where to look.

Nowhere to Put It

Laying in bed last night with my heavily pregnant wife there was the following snippet of converstion:

Her: The baby keeps pressing!
Me: Maybe he* wants to come out.
Her: Well it can't. There nowhere to put it!!

This last line sums up the state of the house at the moment. This weekend gone dad was here and we knockec down the walls that made up the bathroom/boxroom. We opted to bring down the ceiling while we were at it.

As you can see - it's a mess. While we did manage to get one part of the new stud wall in place there's little privacy in the bathroom, spare that provided by the old quilt cover. To this side of the wall is what will become the nursery. As you can see, there's a bit of work to be done before it's ready for a cot.

We rebuilt the walls for various reasons. One of them being that the "original" wall was a complete bodge job. Instead of plasterboard they'd used chipboard. Instead of vertical 3be2s placed every 600mm there were just a couple of 4be3s on their side with long horizontals. Both walls could easily be moved at least an inch by pushing hard enough.

The main reason to reuild the bathroom wall was to move it. The bathroom is this house is not only small but an awkwardly narrow shape. By moving the wall 6" we're hoping it will be less imposing and appear much larger. Obviously we lose space in the boxroom, but that's square and so the difference is less noticable. We hope.

You can see Karen in the photo trying to clean up the mess we made. You'll notice she appears ready to burst. Although she's not due until early December there's always the chance of a premature birth and I really want to have it all done by early November. We'll see.

* We don't actually know it's a he. I just refer to it as one.

Shower Flow Switch

As part of the next big projec - the bathroom - I've been doing some thinking about the shower and how to run the extractor fan. It goes without saying that we need a fan, as the window in there is tiny and there's no other way for the steam to escape. My only issue was how the fan was going to be turned on.

One way of turning on a shower extractor fan is to have it connected to the bathroom light. However, this relies on the light being turned on in the first place. Which isn't ideal. Another option is a manual over-ride pull-cord switch. Again, this doesn't gaurantee the fan is on when the shower is on. Another better option is to have a humidi-stat switch that turns the fan on where there's a certain amount of water vapour in the air. How trustworthy these are I don't know.

The fool-proof option I've gone for is to use a flow switch. This switch simply fits to the 15mm copper hot water supply running in to the bathroom. As soon as there's a demand from either bath, shower or tap, depending on where it's placed, you can have the fan kick in.

I bought mine from here and paid about 45 quid for it. Whether it's as good as it sounds I've yet to discover. I'll report back when I know.

Two Years On

It's two years now since we moved in (as of Yesterday). Whereas Karen thinks it's flown by I think it feel like two years. Maybe because I'm the one who slogs my guts out working on the house all the time.

The year gone hasn't been anywhere as near as hectic or productive as the first. Work commitment mean I've not really had the time to devote to DIY. We ran out of funding at one point too. That said, we've still been busy. While we've not given any rooms the complete makeover we've done a lot of things that needed doing. The potting shed has new doors (the old ones were rotting away).

The back room has new hard-wood French doors (the old ones too were rotting away):

We also have a new garden gate. Yep, the old one was rotting away and about to fall off, which would allow the dog to escape.

Hopefully this gate will last a good couple of years. Notice also in the above photo I've dug a channel to lay the SWA electrical cable to the garage. Next Monday this is due to be connected and I'll finally have power in my man-room/garage.

It's nice to have all these jobs (and others) out of the way so I can now focus on bigger things. It's amazing how much work is involved merely in the upkeep of an old house, never mind the renovation side of things.

There's a baby on the way and so I need to get Quinn in to a new room and convert her old one in to a nursery. This is now underway and the plasterer's due late August.

Instead of putting a stop to all spending and saving for the baby's future and Karen's maternity leave I've taken another angle. We're going to get all the big expenses out of the way now. We now have everything we need for the bathroom. Originally we had decided to put this off for a year or more so we could save for it. Now I just want to get it out of the way. The last thing I want is to miss out of my child's early months/years because I'm buried under a sink. The plan is to have a big push and get, at the very least, the bathroom done before the due date of early December.

Once the bathroom is done we only have the hall/landing to do. The expense here is the tiling for the hall floor, which is about £100 per square metre if you want the repro Victorian stuff. We plan on buying that now and getting it out of the way. Hopefully by this time next year we'll be all but done...

Catch 22

In my last post I was talking about securing my new doors, which I collect on Friday. Since then I've been trying to get straight answers about the new British Standard for mortice locks that I need to follow (in order to remain insured) and have found myself in a Catch 22 situation.

There used to be an old BS for locks where the deadbolt was 14mm. Now there's a new standard where the bolts are 20mm long. If you're fitting a new lock, like me, you have to use the new kind. All very well and good.

The problem is that you can't get the French door rebate kits for the new wave of BS-compliant locks being released. So, if you're fitting new French doors, you can't use the new BS and so there's no way to comply with the regulations, which state that doors fitted henceforth use the latest BS.

So, what do I do? Well, the only thing I can do is fit the old BS mortice lock, with an old-style rebate kit and consider upgrading in a couple of weeks when the newer rebate kit is released. Which will cost me £60 that I didn't really need to be spending.

Note that all this information comes from the guy at the Chubb "supercentre" I've been dealing with round the corner. Apparently he's tried other manufacturers and it's the same story. They've rushed to release locks for the new standard but none have bothered to create rebate kits.