How to Check and Maintain your Guttering or Rainwater System

The best possible time to check your rainwater gutters and down pipes is….. drum roll please…. When it’s raining! I know, crazy huh? But believe me when I say that nothing beats a proper ‘wet’ check of your rainwater system. You can look at your gutters all you like on a sunny day, but if you don your waterproofs and head outside after it’s been raining solidly for a couple of hours you’ll learn tons more. Ignore the funny looks from your neighbours, tell them you’ve lost your goldfish or checking …

Easy Home Maintenance Guide

HOW TO LOOK AFTER YOUR HOME The earlier you spot potential home maintenance problems the quicker, easier, and cheaper it will be to fix them, protecting your most valuable asset. Get started today by reading this easy guide. Turns out that the guide is a bit long for a post here so you can download a PDF version at this link… Home Maintenance Guide, (feel free to share it). Hope you find it useful! Stay well Ian p.s. here is the long text, since ‘google’ can’t read the above PDF …

Tool tip: The Kershaw Cinder, the Perfect Keychain Pocket Knife?

An ideal keyring sized knife for everyone I’ll be honest, I have a small ‘thing’ for knives, mostly because I use one several times a day (not counting the one I use for dinner!). From opening the packages I receive daily, to sharpening my pencil and a whole bunch of cutting tasks in between. Because I tend to swap ‘hat’s’ several times a day from doing the school run to fixing something on a clients property, I need several knives, big sturdy ‘bulletproof’ workhorses on site, down to a tiny …

Quick Tip: Using Wall Plugs (Rawlplugs) in a Plastered Wall

Wall plugs need brick, block or concrete to hold well. Plaster just will not do, because it has minimal holding power. It’s usually way too soft you see. Sure, if the wall is plastered with hard cement render and thin skimming coats, you might get away with some light to medium loads, but generally the plastic plug needs to be pushed into the wall itself so it’s entire length is into a brick, a block or concrete etc. Why? Because the way a wall plug works and holds in place …

Quick tip: Fix Your Laptop Fan and Prevent Overheating

Remove any dust, clean the fan spindle and add a drop of oil. All the HP laptop fans I’ve ever had fail sooner or later, resulting in overheating and the main reason for this is that laptops suck in lots of dust over the months. This dust sticks to everything, the fan blades, the fins around the fan, and most critically, dust turns the tiny amount of lubricant on the fans spindle into thick, black goo (technical term!). The ease of the maintenance I’m about to describe depends on the model of your …

Simple Homemade Cycle Stand for Maintenance or Repairs

Holding a cycle whilst trying to repair or maintain it is a pain. But not any more for me though, because today I made myself a quick and easy tool to hold a bike steady whilst I do what needs to be done. For example; this week I’ve been repainting and re-purposing my daughters old bike for my younger son. A ‘rat’ bike he wanted, as ‘black as your hat’ he said… I’d seen cycle maintenance stands in the store of course, but found it difficult to justify the outlay …

Easy Bathroom Shelf

Made out of old pallet wood. Our bathroom shelf fell down again this week; the vacuum ‘suckers’ just don’t want to ‘stick’ to our tiles no matter how I do it. The metal wire cage is going to break something one of these times. Time for a re-think. So, what material do I have to hand? Really, you couldn’t guess!? Pallet wood of course, what else? I figured a narrow wooden shelf wouldn’t exert much leverage and therefore wouldn’t need a lot of support. Hmm, that half tube of ‘marine’ …