Joe Aston

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What do you mean?

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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.