Jump to content

Joe Aston

Members
  • Posts

    690
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Joe Aston

  1. Not sure if this is the best place for this question but it is somewhat house related and seems to be one of the more active topics at the moment. We are in the process of redecorating our living room and the plan is to put the TV on the wall and hide all power and HDMI cables in the wall and route them to a media centre on the opposite side of the wall. The hiding of the cables seems straightforward enough, channel out the walls and insert cables into trunking, terminate at wall plates and then replaster. My concern is the reliable length you can run an HDMI cable. I imagine once the cable has followed the path of the wall around the outside of the room we will be pushing 7 or 8 meters if not more. Is this going to be too long and if so what are my other options, I have seen HDMI to ethernet converters would this be a better solution? I'm quite comfortable terminating cat6 cables so this would be preferable to HDMI. Thanks for any advice. Joe
  2. That sounds like a great scheme and much better than the shared ownership schemes in the UK. We have been renting our new place for about 4 weeks, should complete next week. I'm desperate to get stuck into some DIY. So much to do. Think il be taking out shares in Screwfix with the number of tools I've got my eyes on.
  3. Joe Aston

    TF Makers

    Those are great. I used to work for a designer brand who bought a lot of this sort of thing and this looks just as good as the stuff we were selling for £150+. How did you finish the edges?
  4. Not a particularly interesting car but we recently picked up a discovery 5. Wouldn’t have been my first choice but for what we need it’s ideals 5 hours back from Cornwall yesterday and it was so comfy on the motorway. some of the lanes were a bit tight but it was nice to get it muddy.
  5. We have finally found somewhere, managed to get it for 10k under asking too. We are potentially going to rent it from the seller short term as we have to be out of the current house on the 14th, so it would only be a couple of weeks while we get the contracts sorted. The survey was done last week so should get the results of that this week. After 7 months of searching, we are finally getting there. The market has been absolutely mad recently, we had an offer rejected that was 40k over asking for a property that we had only seen images of, the seller went for a lesser offer but from a buyer who could move faster. The market is mad.
  6. we’ve got people coming in to do the survey on Wednesday. Fingers crossed it goes well. We can’t find anywhere to buy and our buyer is keen to move ASAP to avoid the stamp duty in September. We got messed about with an amazing property a couple of weeks ago but I can’t be bothered to go through it all again. very luckily though we have been offered a 2 bed flat rent free from a family member until we can find somewhere to buy. Not ideal having to move somewhere in the interim but long term I think it will make buy something a bit easier.
  7. We have finally accepted an offer on the flat. Thankfully via purple bricks and not the other agent, we went with. Considerably less than we initially planned for but we believe this is an accurate price for where the market is in London. Now we need to find somewhere to buy.
  8. Thanks for the input lads. Plenty of options to cover all price points. I might have to start with the budget option until we move as I also won’t have a lot of space. Having to work from the dining table. Good to have a rough idea of costs though. Planning the new home office set up already. I treated myself to a nice chair this week so the audio setup may have a be put on hold until next month.
  9. I start a new job on Monday and i will be working from home, I know they are going to provide me with a laptop and monitor which is fine. However, i like to listen to music while i work so i want to hook up some speakers to the laptop so i can easily mute music and have better quality audio than just using the laptop speakers. I have some nice quality speakers from a old audio set up but no amp. What's the best way for me to connect the speakers and also an external microphone to the laptop, do I need a USB DAC, do these come with mic inputs? The microphone is a rode video micro if that makes a difference. Thanks Joe
  10. A mate of mine had one of these delivered, it ground one cup's worth of beans and then the grinder refused to work, would just whizz away like the burs weren't connected to the motor, amazon replaced it, the second one did exactly the same. She asked me to go round and take a look, the mechanism to open up the grinder for cleaning is terrible, it wouldn't unscrew no matter how hard i tried. I was pretty disappointed as I had been eyeing one of these up, especially as our old pour-over machine blew up at the weekend.
  11. I was made redundant back in 2019 so put some of my severance package into BTC and ADA and it's seen a pretty healthy return since then. Haven't needed to cash yet so i kinda just leave it as a long term investment. I did set up a coinbase account, they have some quizzes you can do to earn up to £30 worth of different coins which you can then trade and play around with. If you need to I think you can cash out pretty easily.
  12. I was not aware of this, I probably should have been. I think because we were selling with them we already had an account so I didn't notice when booking to view other houses with PB that you needed an account. For London the basic price is £1500 all in, this covers your photography and the advert being uploaded to PB, Rightmove and Zoopla, I think outside of London its £1000, there are then options on top which increase the price. For comparison the agent we have coming to see the property on Thursday we would be looking at a max of 2% of the value of the sale plus vat. So significantly more than PB, and that's for a relatively cheap agent, some are above 3%.
  13. I completely agree as you say, Mark, they already have your money, doesn't matter to them how long it takes to sell. We spoke to a few traditional agents before deciding to go with PB but everyone's valuations were about the same, we just went with PB because of the cost.
  14. Given up with Purple Bricks and we've decided to get a proper estate agent involved. I would never recommend Purple Bricks, every estate agent we spoke to said our flat would sell itself and we have nothing to worry about. Having been on the market for nearly 3 months we have only had 9 viewings, one very lowball offer. I found them hard to get information out of, our sign has only just arrived today, 3 months having been told it would take a week.
  15. Yeah opens fine, the kitchen is a bit on the small side but for this kind of flat in this area its not uncommon. We had a viewing at the weekend that ruled us out due to the size of the kitchen. Yeah, this is ours.
  16. Yeah, exactly the same price. Two adverts below, I won't say which is which, let me know which you think is the better advert. Before anyone mentions it, I know house prices in London are absolutely mental. https://www.purplebricks.co.uk/property-for-sale/2-bedroom-apartment-streatham-1108728 https://www.purplebricks.co.uk/property-for-sale/2-bedroom-flat-streatham-1151048
  17. Our neighbour just put her identical flat on the market with the same estate agent (Purple Bricks) and is now asking for feedback on her advert. I don't know why she thinks it's cool to put an identical property on the market with the same agent and then act like it's not a big deal. We have been on the market for 2 months and haven't been run off our feet with viewings.
  18. So my plan fell at the first hurdle, i wanted to have the second access point in the kitchen but because of how the mains are wired up i think the socket i was planning on using isn't on the same circuit as the rest of the flat, i think the cooking is on that circuit so its separate. Not the end of the world il just have to find somewhere else for it live that still gives the coverage i want. The old router i had did have an access point mode so i tried that, got it set up, initially with a separate SSID to the main router but whenever the access point was switch on it seemed to be crippling the main wifi network, web pages wouldn't load on devices connected to the original network but anything connected to the new AP was fine. I need to have a dig around in the settings and see whats happening. With me and the mrs both working from home it will have to wait until this evening/weekend for me to investigate.
  19. I've heard great things about Ubiquiti stuff, I was just trying to avoid spending that sort of cash. Although there seem to be a load on ebay that seems to cheap to be true. Il see how i get on with my this approach. Cheers JT
  20. Well, i was looking at standalone access points and they seem to be considerably more expensive than what you can pick a router/access point/switch combo up for. Would using "router" cause more issues than it would solve in this sort of configuration?
  21. I'm fed up with patchy wifi in our flat, so I've ordered a couple of powerline adapters and a second wireless access point, the plan is to connect the powerline adapters to the second access point and put this in the kitchen. Im planning on setting up the 2nd router with the same SSID and password as the main router and disable DHCP on the second router and assign it a static IP with the main router. The reason for the powerline adapters is i don't really want to run cat6 cables through the flat when we are in the process of selling. Is this all i need to do to set up the second access point so i am able to connect to the wifi? Im not a complete noob when it comes to this sort of thing but i just wanted ask the more educated if i was missing something obvious.
  22. Congrats Mark. The Skye thing is sad, I saw a TV program recently covering a similar thing, the guy was from a really remote part of the highlands and the last thing he wanted was for that area to become a tourist spot. It just ruins it for the locals. If the area isn't big enough to support the community during the office season, the towns/villages won't survive for the high season. Personally, I've never seen the appeal of a second home somewhere, either UK or abroad, i would rather go and see new places than go to the same place every time I've got free time to spend somewhere else.
  23. House prices in London are mad. We have a two-bed flat in zone three with whats considered a massive amount of outside space for a flat, we have had parties with 15-20 people outside on our terrace. Within walking distance of two train stations If we wanted a house in the same area with a garden and off-street parking we would need probably double what our flat is worth and that would probably only get us 1 more bedroom. As people have said above, I know loads of people who are moving out of London into commuter belt areas to get more space knowing that due covid they won't ever be int he office 5 days a week anymore. If I could convince the wife to move further out I would.
  24. If anyone is interested and watches a lot of youtube I would recommend this to block all ads. I followed a mix of the guide below and had to do a bit of other digging around but it was only because I was using a virtual windows machine to SSH into it rather than a physical machine. It cost me about £15 all in, as i already had a USB to ethernet dongle and a power supply and micro USB cable.
×
×
  • Create New...