Well we can’t say they didn’t warn us about climate change, more rain, rising seas, extreme weather. The television is full of images of flooded homes and the miserable aftermath. People being interviewed say that they have never known it this bad. Houses that were once considered above the flood plain are now being deluged and everyone is looking for …

The recent incident of The Apollo Theatre ceiling collapsing on the audience thankfully resulted in no deaths, though it appears there are some very serious injuries. No doubt even many of those lucky enough to have escaped unscathed will have nightmares and may hesitate to enter old buildings for a while. At the very least they will become habitual ceiling …

It’s raining again and it looks set to carry on for days. My daughter phoned to say that the problem of damp around one of her windows has returned. She lives on top of a hill and the gable end of her house catches everything that nature can chuck at it. We have had all summer to fix the problem …

I have always been a sucker for a challenge. If someone tells me that they have a problem that nobody has been able to fix, I am there. Rising damp is not usually baffling but rising damp in a third floor flat is. Yes I do mean rising damp and not penetrating damp, the proof being that some of it …

I went to look at a shower tray leak today. It was the usual story, a leak around the tray. The water was pouring out. The householder had been trying to solve the problem for months. He had even renewed the grout and silicone on the bottom three courses of tiles and still the water poured out onto his lovely …

I have been re-pointing some brickwork this week. Despite having a shed full of various pointing guns I was doing it the old fashioned way with a hawk and a Marshalltown tuck pointer. The reason for using hand tools as opposed to the compressed air gun was simply to reduce noise. The customer has a one week old baby and …

It never ceases to amaze me how many politicians never seem to see beyond their next move. They certainly aren’t chess players. Yet again we see another politician blundering into a trap as obvious as any fools mate. His eye is firmly fixed on the immediate prize and he seems to be blind to the dangers. If only he could …

Qatar, host nation of the 2022 World Cup, (that is soccer for our American followers) is busy building the infrastructure for the games. An expected 500,000 migrant construction workers will make their way across the Indian Ocean to provide the labour and for many it will be a one-way ticket. Put bluntly the Health and Safety record on construction projects …

The British government has been working on ‘The Green Deal’ for several years now. It was originally the brainchild of the previous Labour government but the coalition took the idea on and brought it to fruition. I say ‘fruition’ but that is hardly an accurate description because it has failed to even blossom let alone bear fruit. There are currently …

It might seem like a busman’s holiday but whenever I’m out enjoying myself, I still can’t stop looking at buildings. Now comes the bit where I inflict my holiday snaps on you and if you are well brought up you say “nice” but anyway feel free to comment. The first is someone’s ingenious attempt to protect a gable end wall …

I had a call-back on a job today. The kitchen unit doors were knocking together. I assumed it would just be a simple matter of adjusting the self-closing Blum hinges and I would be on my way. It turned out that the hinges causing the problem were not Blums but the hinges attached to the washing machine. For those of …

As the popularity of under-floor heating increases we are inevitably seeing a larger number of faulty installations. This is the way of the building industry but it needn’t be so. Plumbers are often called in to pipe up under floor heating manifolds to the heating systems after the floor loops have been laid by others. Because it is trapped, the …

I don’t know how the outcome of the Leveson Inquiry will affect the behaviour of the British media, but it needs to get a move on before the High Court building falls into rack and ruin. There’s also the possibility that the door is now a computer generated image and the reporter is just standing in front of a green …

The Government has announced a massive hike in landfill tax and the building industry is up in arms. This is a charter for fly-tipping if ever there was one.

I came across this building up at Snape Maltings on the Suffolk coast. The original building was almost gone and the new owners could have taken it apart bit by bit and rebuilt it with lime mortar importing used bricks to make up the considerable deficiency. …there’s a touch of Antony Gormley’s Angel of The North in letting the metal …

Condensing boilers have undoubtedly become more reliable over the last few years but the last couple of winters saw thousands of householders caught out by frozen condensate. Manufacturers offer clear guidelines for avoiding freezing but not every job offers the opportunity to do things by the book and terminate the condensation inside the building. If the pipe runs to an …

I am currently working on the building site from hell. It was a job I took on against my better judgment. When I was pricing it alarm bells were ringing in my head because there was a new spec and drawing almost every day. The job itself isn’t actually that bad; it’s a complete re-plumb on a large central London …

The golden rule that I have followed through years of fault finding is ‘never assume and never jump to conclusions’. OK that is two golden rules but the basic message is never say you know something until you prove it. This has stood me in good stead where other tradesmen have come and gone from a job missing one small …

I have just read that the number of carbon monoxide poisoning incidents has increased over last year. The reason isn’t entirely clear but I will offer two suggestions. Firstly, the exceptionally cold winter. Nearly all carbon monoxide poisoning is from open-flued appliances such as gas fires. These require a through-flow of fresh air from outside. Natural ventilation which may be …

Have you noticed any increase in the number of scrap metal men doing the rounds? I certainly have, not least because the scrap metal I had set aside recently on one of my jobs walked off after just ten minutes. Two hours later I had another visit from someone who was similarly interested but this time he didn’t particularly care …