Please help us get in and out of this porch

[JoceAndChris]

!! :lol: Thank you for that charming (and accurate) summary of my life dear Mr Hughes. You haven't seen all the cat shaped holes yet, you might not like the ones in the Georgian doors so much. Though now it's after midnight, and as we already know that's when you become anti-CO.

Damn, it's dark, I can't go out and take photos of my Swithies. Alright, "tons" was an exaggeration, there are a few spare heaps- what happened is previous owner came here, found a ramshackle cottage, took the roof apart, and put it back together again, on an extremely minimal budget.

Enjoy M R James- night night.

 

[Jon Maine]

Damn, it's dark, I can't go out and take photos of my Swithies. Alright, "tons" was an exaggeration, there are a few spare heaps- what happened is previous owner came here, found a ramshackle cottage, took the roof apart, and put it back together again, on an extremely minimal budget.

Well it has been light for quite a while now and no photo yet!!

We have stone tiles in this area, much the same as the cotswold stone roof tiles. Few buildings actually retain them, they are difficult to obtain and cost over a £1000 a ton reclaimed which depending on thickness will only cover a few square metres. I am unsure as to whether they are available freshly quarried.

 

[JoceAndChris]

We have stone tiles in this area, much the same as the cotswold stone roof tiles. Few buildings actually retain them, they are difficult to obtain and cost over a £1000 a ton reclaimed which depending on thickness will only cover a few square metres. I am unsure as to whether they are available freshly quarried.

Goodness me. I had no idea they were so expensive. Next time I'm in the area I'll have a good snoop round, including having a sneaky look at your amazing house.

Anyway I'm busy now so you'll all get a bit of peace.

 

[Penners]

Well, there's a first time for everything - and this is one of those times. I'm actually going to drag this thread back to its original topic. (Gosh, I am proud ).

Security measures on your home are always a compromise. Your inviolability to a determined burglar can never be perfect, so all you can hope to do is make the breaking-in process sufficiently difficult that he'll shrug his shoulders and walk away muttering.

But clearly you have to be able to arrange things so that you can get in and out of your house with reasonable convenience.

Probably the best guideline on where to set this compromise is that issued by most insurance companies. This will give you a reasonable degree of protection, and ensure that - in the unlikely event of a break-in - your insurers will pay up.

You'd need to study the small print of your policy, but if you were to follow the required guidelines in mine, you'd do the following:-

1.Can you get in and out using just one of the double doors only (no oblique criticism of your BMI intended)? If so, then fit the other door with 'hidden' bolts top and bottom - the type that you wind up and down with a sort of star-shaped key. Like this:-

.

2. Fit the other door with a 5-lever mortice lock to BS something-or-other (look for the British Standards Institute ice-cream cornet stamped on it), so that it locks to the bolted door.

If you do that, I think you'll find that you comply with your insurance company's requirements (but check your policy to make sure) and be as reasonably secure as you can be. If you do it to both the inner and the outer pairs of doors, your insurers will probably give you a gold star and a pat on the head.

 

[biffvernon]

Swithland slate quarry.

 

[biffvernon]

[The Swithland / Charnwood area is one of my favourite geographical anomalies in the UK - well worth turning off the M1 at Leicester to visit a tiny pocket of the Westcountry where all logic says it shouldn't be. Another is Woodhall Spa - Bournemouth in the Lincolnshire Fens, as I'm sure Biff will testify. It's so delightfully odd to find yourself somewhere that doesn't look anything like what you've just been driving through for the last couple of hours.

Best thing about Woodhall Spa in the Kinema in the Woods, an old cinema with back projection, an organ that rises up and a pianola that plays rolls.


Charnwood is a pre-Cambrian inlier. The slates are particularly interesting to geologists as they were first described as pre-Cambrian and then relatively recently trace fossils were found in some of those gravestones and the rock was reclassified as the oldest Cambrian. It's a mudstone, weakly metamorphosed with slaty cleavage imparted during the Silurian. The Romans used it for roofing, making diamond shaped tiles attached by a single nail in one corner, the diamond hanging down, pointy end protruding from neighbours. Fragments have been traced around Leicestershire and Lincolnshire.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

an organ that rises up....weakly metamorphosed with slaty cleavage imparted during the Silurian.... pointy end protruding from neighbours.

Penners! your turn, I think...

 

[Jon Maine]

I read Biffs post and took it at face value, I also thought I had an overactive mind for double entendres but I give you 11 out of 10 Gareth I am impressed :lol:

 

[Penners]

There's very little enjoyment to be had in spotting mucky double-entendres in Biff's posts, because one knows that he put them there specifically to appeal to the playground sniggerers among us (of which I am admittedly the worst).

Unintentional smut is so much more fun.

 

[Bitstreams]

Never lock internal doors either, if someone does get in they will just kick them through and cause more damage.

Doesn't this depend if they open inwards or not - my in laws used to lock all the internal doors on to the central hallway - since few burglars come through the front door it seemed quite a sensible plan.

S

 

[Lime]

Never lock internal doors either, if someone does get in they will just kick them through and cause more damage.

Doesn't this depend if they open inwards or not - my in laws used to lock all the internal doors on to the central hallway - since few burglars come through the front door it seemed quite a sensible plan.

S

Yes, my hallway is the most secure area of my house.

Much of the advice given by police concerning burglary really is directed to occupiers of modern houses.
One good kick on a modern house door and it comes off it's hinges and breaks into pieces.

 

[Penners]

It may be appropriate to mention here a little cautionary tale about dog doors.

Little cat flaps aren't normally a problem, but for many years we had a labrador x collie, who needed a considerably larger size of pet door to get in and out of the garden. It was large enough for a child to crawl through, but it had a slide-in security flap that made it inaccessible to all but a really determined breaker-in.

We've always believed in playing it safe with insurance companies, and telling them about every possible detail of the house so as to deny them any chance of loophole, in the event of a claim. So we mentioned this dog flap to our insurers. They immediately added a clause to our policy that said, in effect, that our building and contents were fully covered, except where unauthorised entry to the house had been obtained by way of the dog flap. In such an event, we had no cover at all. :shock:

Needless to say, we quickly looked for another insurer, and soon found one whose only condition was that the security flap must be inserted whenever "the family dog is not in residence"!

So, if anyone has a larger-than-catflap pet door, you might want to make absolutely sure that your insurance company won't use this against you, if the worst happens.

 

[Jon Maine]

With all that in mind Penners, I think Joce ought to be aware of cat burglars :lol:

 

[Jon Maine]

We have just got insured with the NFU, they have relaxed a couple of standard clauses as we have a good burglar alarm, cctv and a the garden is difficult to enter with high walls with the street side of the building covered by a secure set of pointed railings which again are not the easiest to climb.

However there is another serious point we have scratched on in this thread which everyone ought to consider.

Fire escape plan.

Do you know how to check doors for heat before opening them, do you have options on escape routes, maybe glass hammers by dg units, do you have a designated meeting point so if everyone gets out the building you know they are out rather than someone risking their life as a neighbour thought they were doing a kindness by taking someone in?

Well worth researching and putting in place. A good hard wired detector system would be an asset as well.

 

[Penners]

With all that in mind Penners, I think Joce ought to be aware of cat burglars

Jon - go and stand in the corner. :roll:

A good hard wired detector system would be an asset as well

My daughter's insurance company insists that her thatched house should have a mains-powered smoke detector system, rather than battery powered ones.

I'm a bit puzzled by this. Why are mains units better? OK - there's no risk of the battery running down, but in the event of a fire, damage to the electrical system would surely knock out all the detectors at once. However if you have a number of battery powered ones, you could reasonably expect that at least one of them would be unaffected by the fire long enough to do its job.

Can anyone explain?

 

[Jon Maine]

They communicate with each other so if one goes off they all go off which alerts you possibly sooner, if it is a panel system it identifies the zone in question. But I think as much as anything battery ones are not checked often enough and can run out plus if you set one off lighting a candle or such like the temptation is to pull the battery and then forget to re-instate it.

 

[Penners]

They communicate with each other so if one goes off they all go off

Fair enough, but battery ones can do the same. http://www.safelincs.co.uk/Radio-Interlinked-Smoke-and-Heat-Alarms/?fdb=true

 

[Jon Maine]

Maybe they would accept them? I still have reservations about radio technology in houses with thick walls, I have been lucky as we had everything apart running some FP20 fire cable was not an arduous task.

You are still reliant on batteries, I guess if you can trust yourself to be thorough it would not be an issue.

 

[JoceAndChris]

Penners, thank you so much for answering the question with what now seems an obvious and fairly inexpensive solution. We'll put this in place ASAP, and plan for a better door bar in the future to comply with Lime's explanation earlier in the thread.

Here are some more pics of the roof and the slates: they are described as "Cumberland" slate in the survey. But I think that Stamford roofer said Swithland, so I'm not very clear. They are indeed diminishing.

I'm not even sure that what's in that heap is the same as what's in the roof; previous owner was a great scavenger.I appreciate the photos are not particularly great, but from looking at them it does seem hard to imagine that this roof should be sold as scrap. The three different roofers who came out all said the roof should be replaced!

 

[Penners]

They look pretty substantial. So they should be safe for you to stand on, when you pour boiling oil on to the invading hordes from the battlements of the barbican above your front door.

Lovely house, by the way.