Squaredy

To be fair Andy you have missed my point. I am objecting to the inconsistency. As a family we could be fined for driving a couple of miles to a local forest for a nice walk on our own. But golfers are driving illegally by the hundred to use the golf course in my village. Of course golf should be allowed with sensible distancing. And so should a family visit to the beach with social distancing.

I don't know how my fellow welsh citizens are accepting the duplicity of the lockdown now. Golfers driving from all over to my village to play golf, yet my wife and kids are stuck in and no longer able to walk on the golf course, and not allowed to drive to other local places to walk or cycle. It sucks. Sort the rules out Welsh so called Government: either allow us all to drive to exercise etc (like England) or enforce it here and stop the golfers. Maybe we should get our golf clubs and head down to the beech for a spot of beech golf. (at 7 and 10 they are too young to play a proper round of golf).

Well yes indeed, but the snooker table will not leave much space for anything else....!

I am going to build a garden room, which will have a snooker table in (possibly full size) and darts board and in the future who knows what else.

Ah well as I said thank you for your input. I will be putting pics up when I have something to show! Not very exciting for you I realise, but I know getting the slab right is key to a simple and successful build.

I am not using a screed, just tamping the concrete then floating by hand. Done it before and found it easy, and gives a much stronger surface of course as concrete is super strong. Don't think the snooker table legs will be too heavy, weight of 160kg or so per leg should be fine I think. I will be using mesh in the mix due to the size of the slab. Appreciate your input. Are you a snooker player?

I may well put polythene dpm under the concrete but cut to fit not folded up into the corners, so hence still needing another method to keep the edges dry. Def don't want damp balls....

I think paying the extra for waterproofed concrete is the way I will go. It will cost £400 or so extra for the 6 cubic metres I will need, but I think that is worth it. If it works. Anyone got experience of this? If you are wondering why I don't want to use a plastic DPM it is simply the extra difficulty of getting a good result when doing the pour at the corners and indeed everywhere the plastic sticks up. I want to keep the pour as simple as possible - after all I don't want to get it wrong.

Yeah it is an amazing flooring, but not a cheap option. I think it was around £110 per square metre fitted, and they had to have a perfect screeded finish first. This was at an engineering workshop and was 450 square metres, so used 64,000 cobbles each one 70mm by 110mm and 75mm high.

I agree of course the more insulation the better, but none of our house has floor insulation, so I am not going to make the garden room the best insulated part of the property! It will be the driest part I am sure. What I would love to do for the floor is fit end grain cobbles, which I have produced in the past - pic below. I am not fitting cobbles because it just makes it a much more complicated project as you need a perfectly flat screed on the slab. My plan is to just float the slab by hand and then carpet it, leaving the middle free for the table. When the table is installed it will need a few shims to get it perfectly level, so this will be good enough. I will install an electric heater and possibly a dehumidifier, nothing else. Most of the year it will be warm enough for an active sport like snooker or darts, just need the heater for the odd miserable winter evening.

Here is the poplar cut and sitting in the sun drying - three cubic metres or so. At the moment the boards are amazingly heavy - maybe about the same as green oak, even though the logs were sitting in my yard for nearly two years - they are saturated. This is enough 3" pop for the walls and enough 1.5" for the roof. I know I will still have to kiln it but this weather is giving it a great start.

If you can make it up to a full timber lorry load with something else I could make you an offer. I take Lime, Alder, Birch, Holm Oak, Oak Beech and others. In fact I will take any hardwood really except Ash at present.

Getting a fully dried post of that size may prove tricky as it will have needed 6 maybe 7 years drying. No sawmill wants to sit on stock for that long. You might have more luck trying reclamation yards or similar. And then I suspect you will need to pay a joiner to plane it square and do the curve for you.

I am not suggesting we should not try to take care and social distance, but there need to be clear rules which people can believe in. To suggest it is fine for golfers to play 18 holes a day whilst a fisherman, walker, metal detectorist, beechcomber, bird watcher, forest forager etc all have to stay at home is ridiculous.

Lockdown in Wales seems to have been de facto abandoned. The golf club just by me is open again from this morning. The lockdown rules in Wales state you should not drive for exercise, yet all the golfers are driving to golf. The Welsh goverment could easily have stopped this - just announce that you are not allowed to drive to a golf club and that it will be enforced. After all unlike beauty spots there are only so many golf clubs. Unless I have missed something there has been no attempt to stop it, so by default they have approved re-opening golf clubs. I am not whingeing, just personally I am not going to be a total mug. If it is OK for golfers to drive here and play 18 holes of golf whilst social distancing, then I will also take my family to different places like coast path, forests etc and have a walk and also social distance.

If you were in my area I would make you an offer. Hopefully someone near will give you a shout.

Fair enough then it has not totally failed. Certainly not been a spectacular success though. As far as I can see the UK is doing just about as bad as any country in the world in terms of deaths per capita. Let's see what happens as we ease the lockdown.

I agree with almost all of what you say. In your first line however you say UK lockdown has worked as it has flattened the curve so stopping our NHS being overwhelmed. My point in this thread is that we have a much higher death rate than Sweden who had and still have no lockdown. So did the lockdown which has cost vast amounts of anguish and possibly millions of jobs stop the NHS from being overwhelmed? Or has it made no real difference? Sweden are managing far better than us with just recommendations not sanctions (apart from banning gatherings over 50).

Yes we don't know when or if we will get a vaccine, as highlighted by these conflicting two headlines just posted by the Metro. UK leading race to find coronavirus vaccine 'as early as September' METRO.CO.UK 'The speed at which it’s happening is astonishing as vaccines normally take five to 10 years.' 'We may never find a successful coronavirus vaccine,' minister admits METRO.CO.UK Business Secretary Alok Sharma said the only way to 'definitively conquer this disease' is with a successful vaccine. Mind you maybe that says as much about our press as about this pandemic...

UK is possibly experiencing the highest death rate from Covid 19 in the world. 34,500 deaths from a population of 66 million. Sweden have a death rate way lower per head of population (367 per million - UK 517 per million) and have no lockdown. Is our lockdown actually helping? Would we be better off advising people to take sensible steps and avoid mass gatherings like they do in Sweden, or are we just too stupid in the UK to actually be sensible? Is the lockdown causing more health problems than it solves? E.g. bowel cancer screening (2nd biggest cancer killer in UK) has all been paused. My mum would be dead now if it were not for her bowel cancer being spotted early in 2012. Feel for the poor guys who submitted a sample to bowel cancer screening and have been advised they need further investigation, but that is also now on hold. Bowel cancer must be caught early, so delay can be lethal.

I know it would be good to do so, but trying to keep it simple. The building must be dry, but as long as I can avoid the worst of the heat and cold that will be fine. The finished building will not have a TV or computer in, so not for lounging around in - snooker is a very active sport as we all know

Thanks guys for the input again. I was aware of fibre added to the mix, but didn't realise it was really strong enough. The slab will have no vehicles or major weight on, I just felt due to size it might be sensible to reinforce. Would be much easier not to bother with the steel.

Maybe I can use this on top of the concrete. Damp Proof Membrane 5L WWW.TOOLSTATION.COM Water based rubberised bitumen emulsion for internal and external use. Can be used on walls and floors to prevent... Anyone done that? Then perhaps followed by screed I guess? Or even just floorboards etc straight on top.

Well I am struggling to prove you wrong, Cardiff really does have most rain. Finally us Newport people can be smug about something when compared to our more glamorous neighbours....we get 20% less rainfall than those posh Cardiffifians....

I always knew Google was crooked! Actually I very much doubt Cardiff is the wettest city. Let me have a look....