Funny item in Times2 today about people not realising their limitations in the DIY field. Like the guy who managed to fall into a cupboard and get stuck such that the fire-brigade had to demolish the stairs to get him out. And the usual slew of people removing load-bearing walls.
I've managed to look at a CH pipe, then nail a bit of wood to the pipe. And in 1970 I crashed all of CERN's central computers by typing two characters on my terminal.
Any funny stories out there? Funnier than Drivel, I mean.
I was Contracts Manager for a ground engineering firm back in the
1980s. We were constructing the foundations for an underground electricity substation when a services duct next to our excavation collapsed and cut through a bundle of newly installed BT fibre-optic cables.
Instantly, one third of the telephones in the City of London were out of action. BT worked day and night to restore them but it took 2.5 days before normal service was restored. We weren't especially popular with BT, but a few years later I was talking to someone from Mercury Communications - BT's main competitor at the time - who recalled the incident and the fillip it gave to Mercury. ;-)
Of course Mercury has itself long gone, having first metamorphosed into the mobile phone operator One-to-One and then being sold to Deutsche Telekom and renamed T-Mobile UK. Now T-Mobile UK has merged with Orange.
Similar to yourself I have had the water problems, a squeaky floor board was irritating me so I worked out from the rows of nails where the joists were and drilled a small hole in preparation for a screw. As I removed the bit there was a neat little fountain coming out of the floor. Central heating pipe :-( That was the day I remembered that water conducts electricity, the ceiling below the "leak" had flooded a lighting rose and as I held a well earthed copper pipe and put my hand in the water............. Lived to tell the tale.
I think my most dramatic attempt at the Darwin award was when I used to burn rubbish in a 40 gallon drum, the sort with pick axe holes around the bottom. I had packed it with cardboard the night before and overnight it rained. No problem, petrol was at hand. Poured a pint or so over the cardboard and allowed it to percolate down. 5 minutes later out come the matches, luckily I decided to apply the match to one of the holes at the bottom. It was at the time I remembered the principle of the internal combustion engine. When I recovered from the rather loud bang all I could see were burning cardboard pieces sitting on the roof of the house. Apparently it was quite spectacular, pity I missed seeing it!!
OK on CERN, you never worked in a large UK car plant too did you? I was visiting one a couple of years back and it was very quiet....... An outside IT guy was in and had managed to tell every router on site to power off / reset or something similar. Apparently the command should have only gone to one, but all had seen it and obeyed. He was now going around the site powering them all up again.
A very tall friend of mine once fell through 2 floors of a building we were looking around. It had been stripped out and just had the normal debris left around. All the windows were boarded up and we were working by torch light. There was a startled shout followed by lots of crashing and the silence. There was an open walk in sized cupboard door, a large jagged hole in the floor, and in the floor of the cupboard on the floor below. On the ground floor was my friend looking confused sitting inside a similar cupboard. It seemed that there had been some form of lift, dumb waiter or similar at sometime and when this was removed some enterprising soul had turned the access into cupboards, using very thin plywood!
Enough? Can I go back out and play in my garage now?
Charmed life all right. Once I mixed potassium permanganate and flowers of sulphur in a test-tube and heated the mixture over a burner. Luckily the window was open and the test tube was aimed at it - the whole mixture suddenly went poof and shot out through it.
1) Knowing your limitations. My main limitations are not tackling anything requiring more than one person (my neighbours are often interested in my DIY, but are not really able to help), and being too much of a perfectionist (there are a couple of things I haven't finished because I can't work out the perfect way to do them), but I'm fully aware of both limitations.
2) Safety. I am perhaps fortunate in having done many H&S courses with different employers, but there are a lot of DIY people who have no clue about safety (sadly, all to evident in posts in this newsgroup from time to time). I instinctively do a mental risk analysis before any activity. Although I do sometimes work from tall ladders, if I'm doing anything other than a few quick trips up and down, I'll get some proper scaffolding erected - it's much cheaper than most people would think, and it's so much easier and safer to work from.*
If you manage to undertake the task safely, is what you've done safe? This is where you might come a cropper demolishing a chinmey, or taking out a supporting wall. When I took down some walls, I had a structural surveyor come and check first that they weren't supporting anything.
I was listening to an interesting interview with a coroner on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago. The interviewer asked him if his work influenced his life outside work. He said one thing he never does anymore is go up ladders. He admitted that this is probably slightly irrational because he sees all the cases where going up a ladder went wrong, but he sees enough of them that it put him off.
I was in an orthopaedic ward a while ago with a chap (self-employed, ran a cleaning business) who'd reached too far off his ladder. Smashed elbow and a damn great hole in an ankle. Plus various lesser injuries. He eventually left the hospital after 7 weeks, still unable to walk, but needed further treatment at a specialist unit.
Andrew Gabriel wibbled on Monday 03 May 2010 14:51
What sort of money are we talking about? Few hundred rather than a thousand?
Only you've got me thinking - I have 2 x 3.5m dormer facias to remove gutter, cut a lot of ventilation holes, add suitable vent guards (to deflect any drips + insect screening) and make sure the lot is rain proof.
It's a job I've been dreading due to the amount of fiddling with power tools
5m off the ground (I hate heights wobbling off a ladder) plus the large number of holes I need to cut (prolly 10 per side).
I'd always assumed it would be a grand plus for scaffolding, but if it's a few hundred with ladders included, then it's a no brainer for me. Probably only need it for a couple of weeks and I could deal with a few other issues whilst I was up there.
A question I was about to ask but of course the answer will be "it depends". But say access to all areas on a gable end of normal sized two storey house?
Not to mention all the faffing about up/down ladder moving it moving it back etc etc. I suspect the over reaching at the top of ladder is influenced by the faff of having to take all your tools down, moving the ladder taking them all back up again...
I hired an 8 X 4 "climb up inside" tower, delivered, erected to do chimneys of a 3 storey house (so getting on for 4 storeys), and taken down again a few days later for =A3100...from a local independent tool hire place. Twas a few years ago now but one of my best bargains looking back...
I'm very aware of the dangers of ladders - I always use a stand off & a ladder mat, observe the 4 up 1 out rule. Tools go in a bucket hauled up & down with a rope.
Dave Liquorice wibbled on Monday 03 May 2010 17:16
Just a couple of dormer fascias, one front, one back. Hard paths both sides to stand the scaffold on. Fascias are about 1m back from the lower roof otherwise a tower might be a good solution - but I don't think a tower would work here.
I had considered climbing onto the dormer roofs and "batting" it over teh edge but I'm not entirely sure I like that idea. I was reminded how much I like not hanging off ladders when scrambling up one to dissasemble a tree!
And the lack of good tie off points to secure the ladder too. I'm never happy beyond a quick once up and down (say to clear a gutter) unless I have the foot tied and the top tied.
I should ask a couple of local firms. If the house building work has dried up, they might be offering good prices.
I do not mind the ladder work at 5m off the ground. What I struggle with is that small step from the ladders onto the roof at
5m.
As for the H&S rules there is a video knocking about of me pissed up climbing onto a mates roof to put up a "Congratulations on your divorce" flag onto his chimney. Not the best move I have ever made.
Shop around. It was 5 years or so back, but I had a gable end wall done for £250. You can almost enjoy the job with correctly positioned scaffolding. Mind you, they took their time coming back to collect it. I suppose they were waiting for another job to come up so they wouldn't have to double handle it. There was certainly no time limit.
Apart from the safety aspect, doing anything up a ladder that requires both hands is tiring because the lower bit of you is flexing to create stability. And IME the bottoms of your feet get sore.
A row of big screw eyes to lash the ladder to can be reassuring, but that's a job on its own, and not very effective with a stand-off. I always use one because of the more comfortable working position
Scaffold hire is circa 65/week. So basically not much more than a bargain bucket ladder.
You can buy DIY-grade towers quite cheaply, but from the wobble I would suggest buying outriggers to be certain and of course self- levelling capability if necessary.
As for Handymen, I would have thought a self-assemble aluminium unit is a "no brainer" for safety. Anything more than a 8 stepladder should really be a tower because you are not just "up a ladder" but need all the tools, screws, paint, putty, SDS, sander, scraper, paintbrushes, primer, undercoat, mortar, mortar dye re colour, diamond bit and just so on. All at once, you never know what you may find needs doing :-)
A HSE colleague put it "ladder for up & down inspection, tower for anything practical, scaffold for doing any task involving traversing".
Outriggers are important even on mini-towers though. Knee boards & foot boards or at least nets likewise important.
Not done that, but I did put in an upstairs floor at my parents' house in France - stepping from joist to joist and due to the 42°C heat, laying one (4" wide) floorboard, drinking a (rather weak) beer and then repeating. Unfortunateley there was 18' of flooring at 4" a time!
Pah - I made enough ammonium tri-iodide to be half an inch deep in a jam jar (under 2" of water)
It went off in my hand and I was left with the intact screw thread of the jam jar, a ringing in my ears , and a large purple mark over more than a square metre of the ceiling
Working in a cupboard under the stairs, managed to drop the main Earth so that the bare end (ooer!) landed on the L busbar of the CU. Now, the 100A fuse on the incomer is rated, I understand, taking into account some reasonable distance to the fault - about 1m really doesn't hackit. After a minute or two I could see well enough to crawl out through the access hatch. 'Phoned my GF (her house I was working in) and she got the company out pretty quick by playing her disabled card. Fortunately, the chap who arrived thought that it was funny.
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