Did you change the frame geometry to make it flat bar friendly as well then?

Why on earth would I need to do that? Drop bars off, flat bars on (580mm). Steers the same, no problem.

Are your kidding about the TDF 20??? That’s exactly what I did to my bike!!

I don’t mind paying the fee if it was calculated to be a reasonable charge based on work involved etc. I work as a civil servant and I know someone somewhere will have made a decision and there should be documentation somewhere. We normally give this info out for free. They shouldn’t be making a profit from it.

FOI Request / I had thought of that – they aren’t allowed to charge more than £10 for that I seem to remember.

I was counted as a First Time Buyer for some odd reason, as there was a 6 month gap between selling on place and buying another. Seemed odd, but meant I had access to better deals !

The 6 month thing might happen with us but I am hoping not!

Depending on your LTV HSBC have some cracking rates on low rate trackers for the life of the mortage.

As a First Time buyer I got 2.09% plus base rate for the life of the mortgage. If you have 70%+ LTV you can get that down to 1.69% plus base rate or 1.49% plus base rate at 60% LTV

We fit into the 60% LTV so I have been looking at the 1.49% + BR. We are HSBC Advance account holders so the set up fee is halved. We really want to stay with HSBC with our mortgage as they have been amazing with our current mortgages. Thankfully they have some good deals on now so it won’t be an expensive option.

They also have a 24hr mortgage promise – basically when we go in and say “yes we definitely need the cash for this house we’ve found” they only take 24hrs to confirm rather than the 2 weeks that it normally takes (apparently).

My brother Peterpoddy had his chainstay replaced on his 853 Inbred by Argos cycles I think – it now has a properly designed chainstay on it….

Costs a lot of money (I’ll point him to this thread) but not sure how much of that was the nice paintjob he had on it.

I suppose I could get a tracker type mortgage and overpay on it a fair bit..

Can’t see a pic. :-/

Update – went to look at the houses who had contacted us. The one that was already on the market was fantastic, absolutely mint. But it’s still £30k overpriced in our eyes. I don’t know why I daren’t offer them such a cut off their asking price, maybe I should.

The other house which isn’t on the market was fab, fields at the end of the garden, nice big garden too. House was fairly basic but in good condition. They are going to figure out a price and get back to us.

We also caught wind of another place which we visited. Again this was a complete minter with very high spec interior but it was a bit small. They are going to come back with a price for us too.

While my wife was away I decided to have a drive round another village and found by chance a house with a handwritten for sale sign outside. Rang the number and had a chat with the owner, going to see it tonight!

My wife and I watched it on the plane on the way back from JFK.

I normally like crap films, I tend to see the good bits in films and try to enjoy them as much as I can.

In this case I have to say it is the worst film I’ve seen in a long time. The bit in the middle when she had to get the sign off to be a member of the royalty or something?? That was completely lifted from the HHGG. It was so wooden and you didn’t really care what was happening.

Awful.

Hora in tights?????

NOOOOOOOO!!!!!

I think you might struggle to be honest. No trail centres in the local area, I would say ringing round the local bike shops would be your best bet.

If you watch that video before you go out for a ride you are GUARANTEED to have a great one!

We get all distracted by equipment and speed and comfort and efficiency and progression, when all you need to realise is that just riding any bike anywhere at any speed can be so much fun.

Already been done with a very similar title!

42 points on license and still driving…

The red Pro ones are back on offer, £300 for all 3.

Some people know my brother. ;)

After trying to enjoy a nice relaxing time next to the river in Windsor a few years back and realising very quickly this wasn’t going to happen due to all the planes overhead I do have sympathy for anyone under a flight path.

I still have no idea why anyone would want to pay extra for a house in Windsor, you couldn’t pay me to live there. Even worse I experienced it closer to London in Isleworth and I couldn’t believe how bad it was, how do people ever sleep or relax?

They should find a way to power passenger jets with stinky rotten farts. I swear I did enough of them on a recent flight back from JFK to power at least one of the engines myself.

That’s the weird thing – I haven’t been looking at Ritchey stuff either!

I did chortle at the Pollock mouse mat too. Might buy one anyway as its so random. :-D

It’s on my phone, I don’t look at anything dodgy on it, 99% STW/retrorides and wikipedia/google searches. The only thing I’ve looked at recently which doesn’t fit the pattern is maybe that I searched for “worst tattoo” on google last night,but nothing I saw made me think I needed to remove my, or anyone elses, crown jewels.

If I’m going to put my back out it will be straining for a PB weight

Most people hurt their backs doing relatively light lifting tasks, not heavy ones. Generally most people prepare themselves properly when trying to lift heavy weights, so they natural put themselves in the right position and posture. Our bodies generally do things right when they are lifting at the edges of their ability. It’s the tasks which we know are well within our limits which we get lazy with and do it badly.

It isn’t the weight which causes the damage, so your pen/weightlifting excuse doesn’t really work, it’s the twisting and posture that does it. You can quite easily injure your back moving your own body weight around.

I’m not trying to make myself clever or trying to belittle you – I’ve lived with chronic neck pain since I was 30 by doing it wrong and I don’t want anyone else to be affected the way I am. It can be chuffin miserable sometimes.

I thought we had it bad, I refused to go on a manual handing course as I don’t manual handle anything other than a keyboard at work.

Well then you’re a compete muppet. I was trained as a trainer for manual handling and all sorts of other stuff. One of the courses I went on was taught by an ex-London paramedic. He said one of the worst manual handling incidents he attended was a guy sitting in a normal office chair turning round while sat down to reach a folder off a shelf. The combination of the twisting, load at distance and his position did something in his back. They had to inject some badass painkillers in his back (or something) to get him out of the chair and into the ambulance and he was just constantly screaming from the pain.

A manual handling course would have taught to set up the folders in a more accessible place or a place he would have had to get out of his chair to reach in the first place.

As someone who has a very bad neck which affects his cycling done through incorrect manual handling I would say it’s pretty damn important to get the right training. the people who think the training is useless are generally the people who haven’t been hurt…… yet. :-/

Ton – Foxhall Environmental, based in Birstall. Decent company with proper authorisations. No idea on price but not worth cutting corners.

Qwerty, your asbestos is now almost certainly illegally contaminating some ground somewhere now, you may as well have fly tipped it. £100 for that much material is way too cheap. Landfill tax and gate fees run to £108 a tonne at the moment, that’s for standard waste not hazardous waste which is way more.

If you think it was disposed of safely you could always ask the person who “dismantles farm buildings” to supply you with the hazardous waste consignment note to show it was disposed of at a properly regulated waste site.

I also assume the person who did this great deal for you cares about the health of himself/workers and people around where the waste was dumped, or maybe not. Anyway, doesn’t matter, it’s not as if asbestosis is a particularly nasty, painful and distressing way to die, is it? :roll:

If you worked alongside me with that attitude to H&S I’d want you to leave….. ;)

Now we just have to find a place.

That’s the difficult bit!

Franksinatra – I think we have a couple of new agents in our area who might be doing the same thing, internet based and no high street presence but just operating locally. I viewed one house one was selling and they seemed very good from that limited perspective. I think that maybe the way forward, more like the USA model of estate agent. I know a realtor in Las Vegas and he explained how it worked over there, although more expensive than the way we do things I think it is very much geared towards the customer and the agent gets nothing until the people are moved into their house and happy. The realtor does everything, markets the property and does the legal stuff etc

And the fee is the same no matter how expensive the house so if I had sold a £250k house the fee would have been 0.25%.

Then you didn’t try very hard with the agents. Average fee here is 1-1.5%

With the price I got for the house I paid 0.6%

So if an Estate Agent had got just 2% more on the sale price, you’d have been better

I can’t see your point – I used an Estate Agent.

Update – after a few weeks looking at houses (pretty much anything within budget even if it looked unsuitable on the Internet) I was starting to get worried as we couldn’t find a place. Everything either needs drastic work which we couldn’t do as we need to live in the house or they are vastly overpriced.

So drastic action – I made a short and friendly leaflet and posted about 150 in the village we want to live in. Got a couple of responses, one from an already overpriced house which I think we will go and look at – it’s already on the market. The other one hasn’t been put on the market and it’s one of the houses we really want. I don’t know if it will be in budget but it should be. We are going to meet the owners on Thursday, hopefully we can sort a deal out. I don’t necessarily want a bargain, just a fair price, and in the meantime save the sellers the EA fees.

Small update. Housenetwork have been fantastic, great comma with them and they have been faultless. We are now at SSTC and they are buying time for me with my buyer until I can find somewhere else to live. Love their online system and I would recommend to anyone.

I reckon they know your house will sell fast so they don’t want to advertise it until they know you can’t back out as once your house is “out there” you’ll sell it no problem without them. As they operate on a no sale no fee basis they don’t want to lose out on their fee I suppose if you cancel early.

If you want to save money on the sale go with an online estate agent, housenetwork were simply brilliant with us and it cost very little for excellent service WAY BETTER than a normal EA just with no high street shop. There’s a money off code in my link about it here http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/online-estate-agent-housr-network-the-adventure-begins

I suppose a lot of people want to have the safely of an estate agent and they are useful to sort things out for you but the high street ones just seem very expensive for what can be a very shoddy service at times.

ton – Member
god made beer, to show us how much he loves us……..fact.

As a Christian I would like to agree with you! You need to remember the first recorded miracle of Jesus was turning water into wine at a wedding party.

I don’t drink very often at all but sometimes only a good quality beer will do….

No experience like yours but I’d say spending loads of money installing a new electric heating system is a false economy, I reckon you’d be better off sticking with what you have and using it at little as possible – wood is free if you look for it constantly and would be a free source of heat to heat your whole house.

Bookmarked for future use…..

Difficult to fit at all? Reasonably good at DIY myself.

I thought the hot ones were really nice. Not too hot I thought. It was nice to have a mix of hot and not so hot in a bag though, they went down far too easily!

If they have had the courtesy to come round and chat to us when they bought the place and discussed the extension with us they may have saved loads of money in having to change plans and we could have given them advice on the area. However they have just sought to antagonise us at every step and I won’t rise to it. It’s only them who are getting all hot and bothered about things.

I don’t actually know what they want to be honest. I think the only reason they are pushing back about this flue is that a builder came round and said it was illegal. Yes it doesn’t conform to current standards which is what I think the angle was they were coming from but as we know that doesn’t matter. As it’s the only thing they have to annoy us with in retribution for us objecting against their planning permission they have kept badgering us. But now an official from Northern Gas networks has said its ok and I am armed with the correct info so we don’t need to do anything and I have been nice and educated/reassured them as calmly as possible.

I was going to get the gas appliances checked anyway for the new owners so it’s no skin off my nose to give the neighbours a copy of the safety report that I’ll be sending to my conveyancer anyway.

I have checked the building control register and our extension was signed off by then when it was built – fire was installed at the same time. So all ok BUT I am paying £15 to get a copy of the sign off as I don’t have it myself.