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I’m leaning towards a tiny toilet in the redundant cupboard space. Drain connection is the only complication - the nearby gulley type drain for kitchen wastes will have to be dug out and re-made.

With a wife, four daughters and five grand daughters believe me there is little that I don’t know about this and other female topics. But at age 75 I think the missus has decided it’s time for more civilised options than squatting behind the garden shed or peeing in a bucket.

Looks neat but how do you get on with leaning over the toilet to hand wash?

The main driver for the downstairs toilet is Mrs G2 who suffers with her knees (from gardening!) and has clearly a bit more issues peeing in my the garden. We don’t have stinging nettles but we do have neighbours.

The biggest convenience our house lacks is a downstairs toilet. It’s very inconvenient having to go go upstairs to have a pee after gardening or dog walking. Enough of the puns - it’s very hard to find the space to put one in a cost effective way (eg close to drains and water). One option is to...

You don’t just have a ‘nice friendly chat’ with a planner here in Mid Suffolk. You pay £100 minimum, fill in a form, enclose official site plan, drawings and photos and get an answer by email in 14 days.

We left our canal boat in a boatyard to have work done. At some point a rat got in. The devastation, smell and mess we found on our return was appalling. The rat had vanished, presumably getting out when a yard worker opened up at some point. No sympathy for rats since then!

Shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve cut 4mm steel on my canal boat, including circular holes for chimneys and windows. Bosch metal cutting blades and cutting oil worked for me - the oily swarf makes a right mess over your jigsaw though.

Thanks for a lot of useful comments. To sum up - most say ‘they’re both decent and similar’. A few say DIYK are better. No one says Howdens are better. Howdens have local branches which is good. Everyone hates Howdens opaque pricing.

Are you talking ‘German’ as in ‘made in Germany’ or is there a brand of that name?

Our house was flooded recently and the kitchen damaged. It’s a top-end one from ‘DIY-Kitchens’ which I installed we are very impressed with. The insurance assessor’s contractor for the repair work wants to replace it with a Howdens kitchen because that’s what all the trade uses. I can’t say we...

We were out on a canal in our boat once and got stopped by a tree - small but still a tree - blocking the way. I tried in vain to cut it with my small saw. Other boats arrived and instead of helping began mooring up and making tea with ‘we’d better wait for the waterways people’ shrugs. Then...

It’s probably quicker to use Google than wade through a badly translated and poorly indexed manual.

This whole thread has been very salutary. I shall be much more careful with my Dewalt table saw. I’d appreciate safer working guidance on two operations I do which I probably shouldn’t: ripping longer pieces which can overbalance off the end of the table before the cut is finished and...

Why is that a condemnation of plastic plumbing in particular? Any sort of joint under a concrete floor is a big no-no unless pressure tested. Copper piping will also be corroded by concrete unless properly wrapped.

I’ve become a fan of Tectite brass fittings. Our trad canal boat has an exposed vintage engine with lots of 15 and 22 mm copper pipe on show. I used them here - quicker and neater looking than compression, work every time and demountable too. Done the same for the visible ch pipes - very smart...

This thread has been a fascinating read. We’ve experienced all the issues over the years! We were having pretty major work done on our house while living on our canal boat. Our neighbour said ‘we always knew you were coming home as a flurry of vans would turn up.’ Result: rushed, slapdash work...

Like 70-odd other houses in our village of Debenham Suffolk we were flooded in Storm Babet three weeks ago. 12-15 ins through the ground floor. We were lucky enough to live in a house with solid largely tiled ground floors so, unlike many, we are still at home with services running again...

It’s a fascinating thread but the amount of knowledge, time and research the OP put into it makes me, in some ways, even less willing to consider a system for our house. There are so many cowboy (or simply second rate) operators out there and even though I’m not entirely electrically illiterate...

We got flooded in Storm Babet this weekend. My shed cum tool store copped it badly - nearly three feet underwater. TBH the only thing I’m really upset about is my Dewalt table saw which was submerged. Now the water is down it’s just covered in silt. Any advice on the prognosis? I can clean...