Anne-apolis

  If you have ever needed plumbing work done on the cold or hot water feed in your bathroom or kitchen, I'm sure it brings back stressful memories. Apart from the bashing and banging, exposing these pipes generally requires demolition of parts of the walling, often taking out some of the tiling, which inevitably gets damaged in the process. Here the bath had to be removed to get at the pipes in the wall This is but the start of the troubles! Identifying the source of the problem is often not easy, even with sophisticated leak detecting equipment. Here we had to fill the bath and shower with water over several days to be sure that the leak was coming from the water feed and not from the outlets - water travels in mysterious way. In total, the detection part of the job took several weeks, with both bathrooms out of action for the duration. The next challenge for the owner was to find tiles to match those that had to be removed, an adventure that required much hunting at tile speciali...

  As the weather is getting warmer, it is a good time to look into how to make our spaces cooler and more comfortable for summer. For centuries, people in Africa, the Middle East and other hot climates have developed ingenious ways of ventilating their spaces and cooling the air that flows through their buildings. Traditional ways of building in these hot climates include building rooms around a courtyard, often with a water feature and vegetation in the courtyard to cool and refresh the air. Their streets were traditionally very narrow, so that one building would shade its neighbour, preventing heat buildup. Their buildings were crafted from clay with very thick walls and roofs to  keep the rooms cool, and they often included wind catchers that act like chimneys to draw the air through their buildings. Windcatchers on the rooftops in Iran Creative commons licensed from  https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captador_de_viento But how can we capitalise on these traditional ideas ...

  I recently was alerted to some research that is being done on our perception of temperature  when there is wood present in a room - as the amount of wood in a room increases, so our feeling of warmth increases. This and other studies have been carried out in cool climates, so it would be interesting to see whether this makes a hot room feel even hotter in a warm climate. Instinctively, I would say not - my apartment is full of wood - floors, furniture and artefacts - and my experience is that the rooms feel warm in winter, yet cool in summer. An elegant kist made in the 1980s - the bookcase in the background is simple pine with a dark stain to complement the woodgrain of the kist Moreover, wood gives a feeling of luxury and is very visually satisfying, even if the pieces are not top of the range - a very modest piece of furniture or artefact can make a room seem more complete. This may be attributed to the properties of natural wood: anything made from this material automati...

  My sister has just finished ripping up the fitted carpets in her house and restoring the wooden floors underneath. In the process, they found that some pipes had been laid under the floor and patched over, necessitating replacing some of the floor boards. This can be quite a challenge to match the wood type, especially if the building is quite old. But this led me to thinking about installing a new wooden floor into an existing home. Wooden floors are very beautiful and give a warm feeling to any room, but there are a few things that you need to know before installing them. The first thing is that there are two types of wood: hardwood such as teak, mahogany and meranti, as well as the various woods commonly used for furniture such as oak. The other wood type is classed as softwood, mostly from coniferous trees such as pine or deal, the two most prevalent being Oregon Pine and Baltic Deal. Oregon is usually slightly pink, whereas Baltic Deal is more yellow.  A Baltic Deal flo...