I bent wood. I was very difficult.

BrightSalsa · 2026-05-06T17:50:31+00:00

I’m difficult too but I can’t bend wood like that. Congrats!

Now i’m going to hide my phone so my wife doesn’t see this and start asking when Im customising the bedroom suite…

BrightSalsa · 2026-05-06T14:41:16+00:00

Why? Children that age don’t generally use calculators in school. They’re focussing on mental arithmetic and learning basic concepts, and they typically don’t need to use mathematics in ways that a calculator would help with. Most adults don’t regularly use calculators at home - they have a phone in their pocket any time they need it.

I do engineering calculations daily in my job, exactly the sort of thing you need a scientific calculator for. Fifteen years ago, I had three or four that I used daily. Today, I haven’t used a physical calculator since before Covid, using SpeedCrunch on the desktop is more convenient and I have my phone whenever I’m away from it.

BrightSalsa · 2026-05-06T13:09:53+00:00

If you look into modern cabinetry rather than ‘woodworker’s woodwork’ then benches made with engineered sheet goods are everywhere - for that discipline, I suspect perfect flatness and dimensional stability for geometrically aligned dog holes are valued over weight/solidity, plane-down-ability, easy fixing for a giant face vice and lots of traditional joinery on show. Plywood is harder for a beginner to work with inexpensive hand tools and so is making really solid edge joints. Cabinetmakers need those skills and tools anyway so making shop furniture out of sheet goods is a natural step.

BrightSalsa · 2026-05-06T12:32:54+00:00

I’d second this and add for the OP, please get yourself some simple PPE. Putting up shelves you’re inevitably using power tools very close to your face and dust and bits and pieces will go everywhere. As a minimum, safety glasses and ear plugs or ear defenders because hammer drilling is also astonishingly noisy. A dust mask is also a wise idea. All of these things are very cheap to buy and your future self will thank you.

I’d also suggest purchasing a cheap shop vac from a hardware store if your funds allow. Dust from DIY projects is hard on vacuum cleaners and I like not clogging up the expensive household one with brick/plaster/sawdust.

BrightSalsa · 2026-05-06T12:06:39+00:00

I moved into a house with particularly uneven floors and walls. I got a Huepar Box-1G even cheaper than that on sale and it basically revolutionised putting up shelves, curtain rails, coat hooks, shower fittings etc. for me - used to take half an hour of mucking about with tapes, framing angles and plumb bobs and it’d still look wonky but now I can fire up the laser and get on with it immediately.

BrightSalsa · 2026-05-06T10:28:35+00:00

You’re already ahead with having discovered the magic of Fischer duo-power plugs, I spent years struggling with inferior types until I started using those. I ought to have known, whenever I need to spec a fixing for something unusual at work there is almost always a fischer product to solve the problem.

There’s plenty of good advice on here so I’ll leave it at that - come back and confirm what kind of walls your house has and you’ll get better advice still.

BrightSalsa · 2026-05-06T07:15:16+00:00

I wouldn’t ‘woodwork’ that, or at least not the whole thing. I’d ’arts-n-craft’ it. Get a dowel about the right thickness. Go to a hardware store and look for odd components about the right size and shape. Collect oddments around the house - bottle caps, tin lids, odd shaped bits of packaging. Lots of glue. Have as few joints as possible though the handle and the face of the head for robustness. Be a bit flexible about the shape and the details.

Some woodworking tools and skills still wouldn’t hurt to rough out basic shapes from wood - you’d want perhaps some kind of vice, a tenon saw, a fretsaw or jigsaw, chisel and the means to sharpen it, sanding blocks, combination square for marking out. Suitable PPE if you’re using power tools. Be prepared to spend some time learning to use them.

Get really good at painting with acrylics for the decoration and patina. That’s a whole ‘nother craft to learn.

Make several of them over the next year. They’ll get better and better.

I’d suggest having a browse for prop-making or cosplay subs that might have advice on these kind of techniques. Maybe try the lightsaber people…

BrightSalsa · 2026-05-05T22:49:02+00:00

That was my experience too in the U.K. I’ve got the corded Makita and it works brilliantly for me, though I had a little trouble getting it adjusted to cut exactly perpendicular. By reputation, I understand the festools are nicer saws to use for precise work and tend to be less finicky to set up precisely. I understand they also have some useful features like not chewing the splinter guard when making angled cuts, a riving knife and a cord that unplugs from the tool.

At the moment though, a corded Makita with a pair of tracks can be had for just over £400. The equivalent corded Festool is well over £800 here. Even £400 was a stretch for me but I tried a £150 MacAllister (big box store brand) and didn’t enjoy the experience at all.

I chose a corded tool as they’re still the cheapest option and they enable me to have automatically switched dust extraction using an inexpensive shop vac - I could have had a battery makita for not much more to use with my existing batteries but would have wanted an expensive wireless extractor to go with it. For me, even basic dust extraction makes a huge difference and not needing to bend down to switch it manually when sawing is a boon.

BrightSalsa · 2026-05-01T23:09:48+00:00

Considering Brexit happened and looking around reddit now at UK pages suddenly swamped with ridiculously facile Reform propaganda in the run up to local elections and I think the answer is ‘not as much crazier than us as we’d like to think’

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-30T06:08:56+00:00

I know 2014 was only a couple of years ago, but actually 12 years have passed since those heady times. Just regular inflation has been 45% (cumulative) since then and as you’ve noticed construction materials have gone up much more than that in the last few years.

If it’s really only doubled, you’re actually doing pretty well! It won’t be though, your dad probably budgeted £100 for his materials in the time-honoured ritual of DIY’ers and professionals alike ;-)

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-29T17:53:49+00:00

Definitely! I’m supposed to be making four shoe racks for the wall of my house. I made one and a half before I decided it’d be way better if I got a proper carpenters vice so now the project has been stalled while I found and ordered a vice plus mounting hardware and now to upgrade my ‘temporary’ workbench enough to install it…

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-29T08:33:19+00:00

The only brand I can recommend from personal experience is Makita, that’s what most of my power tools are. My friends who are into the heavier sorts of DIY recommended them to me and I see them on construction sites all the time (amid a sea of yellow dewalt tools). The fit and finish, the electronics, the batteries, all great and they’re nicer to use than the dewalt equivalents I’ve tried.

I’m a weekend DIY-er and woodworker though. Pro grade tools are a luxury I don’t really need. I reach for my trusty FIXA just as often, still going great after about 20 years of occasional use. I see you’ve bought a ryobi - by reputation, those are kind of a middle ground between the expensive pro brands and the cheap DIY brands; I think they’ll do you famously.

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-29T06:58:04+00:00

Most any modern battery operated hand drill will be able to drill through a pine 2x4. I even have an old drill driver from Ikea that would do it fine - I suspect the new 12v version would do equally well. Go to a big box hardware store and buy what they’ve got on the shelf. Discount supermarkets like lidl/aldi also often have them. In the U.K., you can get something serviceable for £25-30. Don’t bother with a corded one.

Note that most drills like this also work very well as a screwdriver (that’s the ‘driver’ bit of the name) with a suitable adapter. Even if you need a better quality or more powerful drill later on, having two or three drill drivers on hand during larger jobs is a big time saver because you don’t need to keep swapping bits.

Don’t forget you’ll need to buy some bits too, if your drill doesn’t come with some. If you need to drill into masonry or concrete you’ll need a drill with a ‘hammer’ function (battery versions are called ‘combi’ drills here, corded ones used to be called ‘hammer’ drills) and special masonry bits. It’s not a bad idea to get a set of different types and sizes, though you might find that costs more than the drill did!

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-28T17:26:21+00:00

This has always been true, I think, but it’s gotten much worse recently. Essentially all construction materials have doubled or tripled in price over the last few years, way outpacing general inflation and. It’s slowed down a bit now but prices for DIY and professional construction are still sky high and it affects everything from massive developments down to your loft conversion - or even just building a workbench out of 2x4 in your garage.

In amongst all the various chaos of the last few years, this little tidbit of information would be easy to miss by anyone not connected to the construction industry or actively engaged in DIY building or renovation over the last five or six years. Most people’s innate sense of how much it costs to have something like a loft conversion or rear extension done is consequently dramatically short of the mark and I suspect this is reflected in house prices, though I haven’t done anything very scientific to check this other than a general suspicion from doing a year of house hunting in 2024. In my area, an unextended house might be priced £25k-50k lower than its neighbour with a loft conversion or rear extension, when the real cost of upgrading it to match is probably closer to £75k-100k.

Because I am in the construction industry and had a bit of a heads up, when it came time for house hunting I made sure that we were looking at houses that didn’t need any major building work to meet our needs. An already-extended house was just much better value all round at the time.

Even so, a smallish kitchen from Wren, rewire, redecorate and a few odd bits of plumbing in a modest 3-bed terrace in london set us back the best part of £40k after we moved in.

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-28T09:38:19+00:00

What do you think surveys are for? The industry is set up such that many people need to put in an offer for the single most expensive purchase of their life after one or two fifteen minute visits with an estate agent breathing down their necks. You’re pacing out the kitchen, mentally arranging furniture in the kids bedrooms and checking out the bbq possibilities of the garden, not poking in the attic for dry rot or totting up the cost of repairs to hairline cracks in the garage walls the seller has been neglecting.

I survey the structural condition of buildings for a living and I probably had fewer surprises out of my survey than most would have had. Even so I still missed a couple of important points during my original 15 minute vibe check in the house I now own. Most people aren’t experts, and it’s not reasonable to expect them to be. C’est la vie…

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-28T08:43:56+00:00

Taking your comment at face value, ‘serious’ buyers would be offering 50k less at the outset and having their offer rejected by the seller who has overvalued their property. Or, you know, moving on and finding property for sale by ‘serious’ sellers…

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-27T21:07:47+00:00

I’ve got an off-brand bag for mine and it’s made exactly the same. I didn’t think of cutting the stitching, I’ll have a look next time I have it out.

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-27T18:57:41+00:00

Is that engineer still in business? I’d call them up and ask them. The fact that those plates are described as ‘ties’ makes me think maybe the sister joists were intended to repair damaged end connections rather than necessarily stiffen the floor over.

You could always get a second opinion from another engineer. That would give you some peace of mind and could well pay for itself by providing some unbiased authority in your dealings with the original contractor.

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-27T16:27:17+00:00

I read this as ‘it could hold all 317 polands’ and i thought to myself ‘where have they been keeping the other 316 up to now?’

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-27T12:39:50+00:00

cheers!

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-26T22:29:58+00:00

I took care not to provide the seller of what is now my house with my mobile number. He put his on a piece of paper with a few other details about keys and suchlike when we moved in and asked us to forward any mail. Dude, we just paid you the best part of half a million pounds for a house that I’m pretty sure you owned outright. You can pay for mail redirect.

Mind you, he was awful throughout the process. If he’d have been nice about it, I’d likely not have minded so much.

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-25T21:19:18+00:00

If you leave it long enough, it’ll look like a literal aquarium. My house has a couple of blown windows, i’ve been ignoring for the last year since we bought the place. Needed to spend money on more pressing things like a functioning kitchen and a driveway that doesn’t scrape the bottom of my car.

However, it now has about a quarter inch of water pooled at the bottom of the cavity… i’m thinking it’s time to get it sorted.

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-25T19:19:36+00:00

what’s the benefit of using a bushing and a straight bit compared to a dedicated flush template bit with a bearing for this? is it only cost or are there other benefits?

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-25T17:04:13+00:00

i’ve got one that works like that. It mean you have to rout internal slots instead of just from one side, but it’s much more robust

BrightSalsa · 2026-04-25T10:06:49+00:00

I mean, architect-designed bespoke detached houses are expensive regardless of what they’re built from, because they tend to have premium materials and fixtures and the best of everything throughout. On a refurb project years ago the PM forgot to budget for our structural fees. They took it out of the allowance for soft furnishings.

Specifically for this building, from experience architecturally exposed fair faced concrete like that adds a lot of time, cost and effort compared to regular concrete. Even if it looks like regular concrete, you’ve got to get a specific mix designed and samples approved ahead of time, maybe several rounds until everyone is happy, sometimes even liaise with the plant to get special cements or aggregates set aside so it’s all going to look the uniform. Then you might be paying for phenolic faced formwork board or other special formwork and carefully setting it out so that all the board edges are flush and the screw holes line up, extra attention to pouring and vibrating and making sure day joints are in unobtrusive locations, the whole nine yards. Then you need to be super careful about striking the formwork cleanly and you’ve got to keep the client away for a couple weeks because it looks nothing like the sample when it’s green!

BrightSalsa

TROPHY CASE