I wonder if in many instances it was initially done to protect those features. Though I guess more likely lowering ceilings was to save on heating costs. But yeah bloody ridiculous. I was running a kitchen in the back of a mates pub, and the council told him that he had to cover up all the stained glass to protect it. My response was what's the point of preserving it if no-one can see it? It's pointless

I remember doing visuals for a place in Belgravia with ornate mouldings like those.
Each room totally different.
We modeled all of them accurately and in fine detail. 

Probably a week of man hours per room. Just for visuals.

Yeah that's amazing.
Looks like a baked meringue right now.

Because of the way the building was converted into flats, that ceiling rose is off-centre in our bedroom. So we’ll retain it anyway and use a central ceiling hook to loop a coloured cord over and suspend a big pendant lampshade. Sort of like this but with the awesome rose and a big fabric shade on the light.

Man got his mortgage approved this afternoon! Absolutely gassed, that's the wworst of it over now, just going through the formalities now and probably having to constantly ring the solicitor to kick them up the arse, etc.

FEELSGOODMAN.

Feel like I should probably do a mental health post but I feel like I've actually managed to get a tiny hand hold on my own future finally and I actually feel like some small amount of freedom has just come my way.

Cheers poppo! Let the browsing of catalogues and budgeting for new furniture commence, etc.

Grats mate, it's a big step and tbh I very much enjoy being a homeowner, despite knowing that it means I can never stop working now as I have a mortgage to pay.

(that may not make you feel good, actually)

You can pull the ivy out by hand easily enough, cutting here and there, just be careful not to beast it out of the slats or you'll bust the fence.  It's probably easy enough to bag up without paying for a rotivator imo.

Throw the brick at it again.

Cheers gents. The fence will get replaced at some point (we moved in in September so plenty to do) but not yet as it's quite a few panels. Will just try and pull out as much as possible and then spray it.

LivDiv wrote:

Throw the brick at it again.

Sadly this didn't do the trick

If you don't fancy renting a rotavator you could turn it yourself with a fork. You could also literally salt the earth as you turn it over

Salting the ground is what you do to your enemies land - not your own. You’d also need about half a ton of the stuff to have a crack at ivy.

Don’t worry about the weed killer giving you cancer too much as a one off spray won’t do you any harm unless you chose to have a swig from the bottle as your doing it. Everyone should be far more worried about that fact that farmers in this country have become entirely dependant upon glyphosate based weed killer (basicallly round up) as a way for drying out all their crops prior to harvest. Srsly, every crop that enters our mainstream food chain or labelled as organic has been sprayed off with a solution proven to cause cancer in humans. Enjoy that slice of toast this morning!

We just got costs in from our contractors for the renovations on top of our structural repairs. Naturally it’s almost double what we expected, and they’ve already done some of it. Time for some value engineering …

Genius!

We can bring this quote down, no bother. Thing like sourcing doors off the shelf instead of having a joiner make them bespoke will save thousands right off the bat.

We can bring in our own flooring guy instead of using the main contractor, that’ll shave another grand or two off.

It’ll be fine. Your initial quote is always just a starting point for negotiation …

You’re watching it live, this is it!

Fuck Kevin McCloud, anyway. Man’s got no idea.

To be honest, we’re getting all this done at really fair prices. It’s just that we’d like to pay even less. First you get your top-spec ideal schedule costed. Then you take a red pen to it and prioritise. There’s always some elements you knew would be costly, but there’s always surprises too – we didn’t expect bespoke doors to be so much more expensive than off the shelf ones, so that item can change (fancy doors are nice, but not nice enough to blow an extra £4–5k on).