DIY thread

[randombs]

Apologies if there's an existing thread but I ran a search for 'shelves' and came up with nothing, so...

I'm renting a room in a flat in London and it's noisy outside. It might be to do with the Olympics but I'm not holding my breath for it to ease up until it gets too cold for people to pants around drunk down there, so I've been wondering about doing some kind of soundproofing(temporary because I'm renting).

The window is a uPVC vertical sliding jobby, about 1.5m high by 1.1m wide and has metal blinds. The blinds are crap for blocking out the light so I've put some blackout material up and fashioned it into a pair of curtains between the window and the blinds which blocks almost all the light(only a bit of leakage either side but it's no biggie).

There's also a vent near the window that is always open but I can just cover that easily if need be. I'd rather leave it to get some airflow and, besides, most of the sound comes through the window.

I noticed the window doesn't seal completely when you close it - there's a 2-3mm gap between the bottom of the window pane and the frame.

In my quest for serenity I bought some of that sticky draught excluding stuff and laid it down. The problem with that is, while it seals the bottom gap well, it introduces a gap where the two panes lock and the sound seems even louder from there, as well as making it really difficult to lock. I kind of fixed that by using less of the tape stuff.

I've been looking at stuff like this.

What I'd like to do is fashion a sort of giant lid for the window that would have grooves that match the frame. I could then just press it onto the window, leave it until morning and remove it. I wouldn't need the blackout in that case, either.

Does anyone have any ideas about temporary soundproofing?

[charlesr]

THIS is excellent soundproofing and will last you for a while with regular cleaning.

[speedlolita]

He's not wrong!

[randombs]

Oh, please...



Also earplugs doesn't help when I wanna watch telly with all the nonsense going on outside and don't want to annoy the neighbours by turning it up.

Plus they'll make me have nightmares about a large monkey poking his fingers into my ears

My current idea is to buy a large sheet of polystyrene. It'd be pretty cheap(maybe I could find some scrap sheets for free to test), light as a feather, and I can draw Street Fighter characters on it!

[koopatroopa90]

I slept with earplugs for a year in our old place - right off the High Street and on the same road as a pub and restaurants. Things don't get that much quieter in the winter, you then have girls screaming "OMG ITS F@#?ING RAINING" and stuff

My suggestion would be to get some decent headphones?

[Fader209]

Nice idea for a thread dudey I do a fair bit of DIY now so can see myself posting in here in the future with projects and help etc.
Unfortunately I know nothing about soundproofing so am little help to you on this occasion!

[Spatial]

Given I've a list of stuff for the new house as long as my arm I can make good use of this thread

First off, anyone know of any reason why I can't prune some trees back this time of year? Got some at the back which are overhanging my property pretty badly and causing a bit of a security issue. I'm thinking of lopping a few branches off to stop people scaling them and making it over the fence.

[randombs]

@koopa:

Well...

1) I don't really enjoy things in my ears. It's the reason I use the Apple earphones and gave up on ear canal thingummies even though they sound better. I have a pair of Sony monitor headphones but they're a bit much and I don't like being completely cut off from my surroundings.

2) I enjoy making things

Worst thing that can happen with the polystyrene is it doesn't work, in which case I have a 2mx1m sheet of polystyrene to play with. I could karate chop it for hours!

Also I've noticed I can actually sleep just fine with the noise, it's when I'm watching telly and stuff that it gets annoying. I think I'll leave the soundproofing for now and start a new project, like sorting out the balconies...

[Spatial]

So after all this nonsense, in a bid to move things along, I've decided there's nothing for it but to get stuck in to the bits I can do myself. First step, remove the cupboards along one wall of the kitchen so that they can be recycled in the utility room, and so that I can cut down costs for when they smash the wall through for a set of double doors into the dinning room.

218840_448080855233342_346710457_o.jpg


That's as far as I can go with this bit though, because there's a chimney breast running above into the stacks in the roof. Thankfully the stacks have already been taken down just below roof level, which means they can just be knocked down. That's the next job, and the one I'm most not looking forward too. Getting that **** down from there is going to be a real pain.

[Spatial]

Smashy smashy! Chimney stack number one is down, going from this:

Stack 1.JPG

to this:
Stack 2.JPG

Bloody hard going on times. Once the first few bricks were out it went fine until about a third of the way down. Then the mix for the mortar in the joints got totally different - in some places it was about three inches thick and the bricks were snapping before the joints were giving out.

And carting those bricks out afterwards was a real workout.

[Spatial]

Mega update time. Since that last post the other chimney stack came down

IMG_5482.JPG

Thankfully this one was nowhere near as over-built as the other one and so it was down in half the time. Removed a redundant beam across the middle of attic too which means the space is absolutely huge now. No more storage space troubles for me

The first internal wall came down, turning two small rooms into a sizeable double bedroom.

33873_455747747799986_957156358_n.jpg

That was always going to be the easiest job out of all the internal alterations, because the wall wasn't supporting. And in some ways it ended up better than I expected - the newly exposed floorboards and ceiling are in good nick which means the making good will be much easier.

Turns out it was light breeze rather than stone, with a seriously layer of plaster over the top - surprising really, given how solid it felt.

So, all of that left this

IMG_5713.JPG

which this weekend ended up in this

IMG_5717.JPG

Because we've be messed around so much by builders we've decided we'll do the whole thing ourselves, including installing the RSJ's. So whilst waiting for the commissioned Structural Engineer to do his report about what size steels we need for support, we decided to make a start on taking out the other chimney breasts that need removing (although leaving the supporting walls in until we get Acro's for the roof).

IMG_5716.JPG

I'd thought the other jobs to date were hard work on times, but hands down this was undoubtedly the worst we've done to date. The closer we're getting to the ground floor where the fire would have have been, the beefier the bricks are becoming. These ones now seem to be engineering bricks, so the frogs on them are absolutely massive, making the mortar joints solid and they take a serious beating to remove. They didn't mess about with building these things back then!

This was the first job where we got as far as that picture and gave up for the day - especially after a stray brick flew through the air and caught me square in the nuts!

[randombs]

Brilliant work, loving the photos.

Hope your nuts are ok

[charlesr]

If you need someone to rub your nuts better.... look elsewhere.

You are braver than me! Nice one.

[vanpeebles]

About time you did some graft spatial Looking good although with the price of energy now I'd have kept the chimneys and fitted a wood burning stove.

[Spatial]

Hey, remember me? I'm not actually dead, I just haven't had time to do anything else than deal with the house renovation for over 18 months now


We'll have had the house two years in June and we still haven't moved in. I guess the real fun started 12 months ago when we were some way into the work.


I'll keep this brief as I can as there's a lot to catch up on, but even then it's not a short comedy of errors. To date ;

- at the start of 2012 we'd finished most of the structural alterations. Things were looking up.


I managed to find an electrician to do the work of sorting out chasing the walls for the wiring and stripping out the old stuff. He came highly recommended. He came in at good price. He turned into a funking nightmare!


Despite telling me he could do it in three weeks, he strung it out until May and then he hadn't even finished first fix. He went off plan, started doing all sorts of things wrong - he managed to fall through a ceiling and ruin it. He managed to smash through several other bits of perfectly good ceiling in a bid to complete his rewire, meaning we needed to re-plasterboard the whole hallway and try to patch a lot of others bits (before giving up because he'd made such a mess of it and re-plasterboarding those too). He also stole some of my work tools (he was the only one who had access with a key) and then he started denying things we'd agreed when I point out to him he's badly cocking things up.


It gets to the point where it looked like I was going to kick him off the job and take him to court to get my money back. Then, the day after emailing him asking how we were actually going to resolve this, I got news that he had been killed outright in a car smash (that wasn't his fault - he was hit by a vehicle which smashed through the central reservation). A terrible thing to happen to him and a terrible thing for his family, but it left me with a massive hole in my finances as we'd part paid him and then I had to find someone else to carry on the work. Let me tell you, Sparkies DO NOT like picking up on other peoples jobs.


Feb 2013 - after being convinced in December by a family member that someone they knew fitted windows and would do us a good deal, I took them up on the offer. I was hesitant but the price was good and the current windows were shot (old aluminium frames that had been badly looked after and were drafty as hell). So I paid them a deposit and they said it would take a month or two to get them and fit them.

We also had the kitchen delivered and put it to one side, all boxed up, and awaiting fitting. Because surely this couldn't take that much longer...

At this point is was bloody freezing as the old rubish radiators had been stripped out. I lost layers of skin off my hands from the cold and could see my breath indoors.


- March 2013 the upstairs toilet decided to spring a leak. We fixed it, only to return the next day and find we hadn't and there was a small tsunami as we opened the front door. Had to smash a hole in a wall to help it dry out but thankfully I ditched the old carpet a few months earlier after discovering one of the radiators had clearly been leaking for several years and produced a rotting smell that was like a dead cat that had been left out in the sun.


By this time we'd made big inroads into stripping all the remaining wall paper of the walls and ceilings (seriously who wallpapers a ceiling?!!). Including getting rid of the really nasty stuff that weirdly smelt of old meat...


- Middle of 2013, I managed to find an electrician to carry on the work. He took two weeks to make sense of the spaghetti junction the first guy had left behind. Things were done to spec and better than I expected...

With all the wiring done we commenced the task of re-plastering all the walls. That took ages due to amount of rooms and walls we had to do.

We also realise that because they'd papered the ceilings that we couldn't save them and so decided to re-plasterboard all the remaining ceilings.

Lovely smooth ceilings upstairs and in the hallway. Crappy artexing on the rest. Lady Spatial decides she wants all smooth ceilings throughout now. We've put the coving up downstairs which means I had to strip the Artex off otherwise we'd have to smash up the new coving. That was messy to say the least, but I did discover and amazing product called X-Tex which is non toxic and gets rid of Artex stuff quite easily (well, easier than using a steamer!)


- July 2013 - the window guy (remember him) appears to have vanished with my money. After some serious chasing it starts of a farcical sequence of events where he comes up with a litany of excuses. I'm still battling with him when November rolls around, but just as I'm about to threaten him with going to court to get my windows or my money back he starts work... progress, it seemed.


November 2013 - window fitter commences buggering everything right up. He starts great the first weekend and then the problems start. Some of the sealed units are marked on the inside and several others are cracked. All the patterned units are different to what we asked for. He shows up whenever he likes. At present the job is still unfinished despite only having two windows left to fit since just after Xmas. He's dropped a hammer through a toilet cistern, smashing it to pieces, and then tried to hide it until I confronted him a week later when he bothered to show. He's put some cills on but it's the shodiest job I've ever seen since they're supposed to be hardwood cills and I've seen cheap PVC things done better.

He tried to make excuses about how he couldn't remove his **** workmanship now as they were foamed on. Hence me knocking them off with a crowbar in front of his very eyes and then having to cut the cill for him to show him how it's done. Even with all that done he still hasn't tried to fix them in place.


He hasn't finished a single window properly and everything is still unsealed. He's `working on sorting that` apparently.


Right now he's got two weekends to finish the whole thing and get out of my life before I kick him off the job.

I could cope with all that, but in December / November things went from bad to worse. We'd struggled through most of the summer with a re-appearing stain in the kitchen where we'd re-plastered. It looked like the burnt stuff from the knocked through fireplace was seeping through the plaster and spreading like crazy with a greasy oily stain. It took ages but we eventually got it neutralised by hacking it back to the brick and then using a (believe it or not) mix of vinegar and water with a surfactant (that's washing up liquid to you and me). I patted myself on the back at finally fixing that and prepared to crack on... then the house took its hideous revenge.


We'd already gone through one cold and wet winter and things had been fine. But last year the first of an army of damp patches started appearing in the upstairs bedroom. Then a lot more. Then it spread from one room into another, around the windows and doors and in odd spots on the wall. Seems the rendering to the gable end is knackered and rainwater is bridging the cavity, ruining the plastered walls and meaning I've spent ages trying to sort that out instead of finishing decorating or sorting out the replacement heating system.


Then last week I looked in the attic and found that, because the gable ends have a cement verge, then the water is just seeping across and rotting the beams. I'm currently trying to sort out the installation of a dry verge, which should hopefully happen this week (I'm too brave to be messing around on the roof and risk taking a very big tumble).


Oh and remember the replacement electrician? He wasn't as good as he seemed - I have a set of lights upstairs that only come on if you cut the power to them (WTF?). He's also not renewed the external lighting I asked him to at the time and they keep tripping the electric if someone sets them off. Which then triggers the alarm he installed which he says is working fine but keeps going off on its own whenever it likes. Now he's refusing to come back and sort these out.

TLDR: I'm having a nightmare!