Welcome to DIY Doctor's blog

Mike Edwards From DIY Doctor is pledging the kettle challenge – to only boil the water he needs.
Simple, but effective as he likes his coffee!

DIY Doctor, Be Energy Smart and Green Reviews have teamed up to make a difference for Climate Week.

What is Climate Week?
It is an initiative that inspires us all to make a difference to the climate by making changes in our lives, these changes can be a simple as avoiding using carrier bags, or as energetic as cycling to work. The idea is that you pick the things you can fit easily into your life, in the hope that these ideas will stick with you throughout the year and then inspire you to make more green changes.

When is Climate Week?
Climate Week runs from the 4th – 10th March 2013. Why not go to the website and set up your profile, you can then pledge donations – which are in actions rather than money.

What can I do?
It is all going on at the DoNation website. Go to the page set up by Be Energy Smart to make a pledge – BeEnergySmart: The Great Green Climate Challenge. You will see the pledges already collected, and the ones we have pledged to do. Click on the ‘do something’ button and you will be given a list of choices.

There are loads of ideas for different pledges, including:

• Filling up your kettle only as much as you need to – and get that cuppa quicker!
• Cycling to work – get healthier and save carbon!
• Feed the Earth – making compost for the garden
• Smart Drive – accelerating and braking smoothly to save fuel.
• Sharing things with neighbours and friends – a great pledge for DIY enthusiasts!

You are bound to find something that suits you, maybe something you keep meaning to do, or something so simple you hadn’t even thought about it before.

If you want to be more ambitious you can make up your own challenge – let your imagination run wild!

A reward for your efforts
Be Energy Smart, DIY Doctor and Green Reviews have teamed up to offer you a great green giveaway. If you make Climate Week pledges, we will enter you into a draw to win a fantastic Roberts SolarDAB radio. All you have to do is pledge to do something to reduce your carbon footprint between now and the 10th March.

The winner will be able to listen to high-quality music in truly sustainable style, with the world’s first solar powered DAB radio. Each pledge you make gives you another chance to win, so pick as many as you can!

Who is involved?
Members of DIY Doctor, Green Reviews and Be Energy Smart teams will be make their own pledges too. They will be using their blogs and Twitter to keep you updated with how they are doing, throughout the week.

Be Energy Smart is a brilliant independent energy-saving advice website. They have loads of information about Eco Friendly products and you should check out their simple free assessment tool to find out exactly which energy-saving improvements could save money in your home. www.beenergysmart.co.uk

Green Reviews is a fab one-stop-shop for reviews of just about any green product you can think of, from washing machines to solar panels. www.greenreviews.co.uk

You already know that DIY Doctor is the UK’s best-loved DIY advice website, with friendly, down-to-earth advice to help you through any Home Improvement and DIY tasks. www.diydoctor.org.uk

The competition will close at midnight on the 10th March, and we’ll be notifying the winner on the following day. Good luck!

Why not tweet your pledge, to let us know how you’re doing? @DIYDoctor

Tweet

Share via email

There has been a real upsurge of interest in traditional crafts recently from the relatively sedentary knitting and crocheting to more hefty stone carving and woodturning.

We applaud anyone who gets involved in these activities, because we believe that making and mending things yourself is much more intellectually challenging, and emotionally rewarding, than just buying something off the shelf.

There has been a trend also of giving these homemade craft items as gifts at festive times of the year, and it is lovely to receive an individually made piece of work from a loved one isn’t it? However there are some Guerrilla crafters who go beyond sharing their skills just with those they know, and who have put their craft work out in the public domain.

Forget Street Art – Street Craft is the new trend
We have noticed a growing trend in Yarnbombing, the practice of leaving knitted or crochet items in public places. The one pictured above is a great example of the type of thing, especially with the ‘smile’ sentiment attached. That seems to be the reason these wool graffiti artists do what they do, to raise a smile and bring yarn crafts into the public eye.

If you spot yarn bombing or any other street art and craft that you want to share please do so either via twitter @diydoctor or send pictures to office@diydoctor.org.uk you can even send us links to videos if you catch someone in the act – or indeed if this is something you do…

Tweet

Share via email

Tell us your 12 favourite DIY tasks for a chance to win a full toolkit
(Tradesmen also get 12 months free advertising on DIY Doctor)

We have some mixed news for you this morning

The sad news is Auntie Mavis and Uncle Jim have passed away in a freak accident on their tandem.
The good news is you inherited their house
The bad news is it is overgrown, dilapidated and in a very poor condition throughout.
The good news is you could win a complete tool kit and a years free advertising (if you are a builder or tradesperson.)

We want to know what your reaction would be if this fictitious situation was real? Hopefully you would you be up for doing at least some of the renovating and repairing?

OK so here we go

The terms of the will state that you have to pick twelve tasks to tackle yourself.

Please tell Mavis and Jim’s ‘solicitors’ which ones you would do. Click here to use our two-question survey to rank the tasks in order of “Work I would be most likely to tackle” down to “Work I would be least likely to tackle”. (It should only take 6 minutes.)

Prize wining and other information

At close of play we will work out the two most popular DIY tasks from all the entries.

Each entrant with these two tasks on their list will go into a safety helmet. One lucky winner will be pulled out and receive a full tool kit for each of the trades. If the winner is a tradesman, they will also get 6 months free advertising on DIY Doctor.

We use the information you give us to make sure our website content is relevant (you know it is free so it might as well be interesting and excellent too!).

If you win we would like to promote the story on our website and social media sites and use a promotional picture of you – you can of course, opt out of this.

Good Luck!

The DIY Doctor Team

Tweet

Share via email

Would you be prepared to send us your DIY disasters?

So many people own smartphones these days that videos are becoming the easiest way of telling a story.

DIY Doctor is reacting to this trend by supplying more and more video versions of our How To guides and Product Review videos, to help you with your Home Improvement tasks and when making choices on which equipment to use for your building projects.

We used to get emails from you telling us what was going wrong, and we still get posts on our forum that highlight common problems, but we are looking for something a bit more graphic.

Now we would like your videos showing the challenges you meet when carrying out building, renovating or repairing jobs at home.

Send us your videos and we will advise you

If you have a project that is going horribly wrong, or you have started a project and found a job that you simply can’t tackle, please make a short video and send us a link. We will then use it to answer your questions.

You can tell us whether we can use it on the site, to share your problem with other users, which could help them if they find themselves in similar scrapes. If you say you want it kept private then we will, of course, respect your wishes.

How do I send videos?

Take your video on your phone or video camera and then upload it to your choice of video service.

Three good video sites that offer a free uploading and sharing system are

Drop Shots

You Tube

Vimeo

There are probably others available – use whichever you prefer.

If you like you can set your video as ‘private’ on any of these three sites, this means they are not available online, but they can be shared by invitation. Otherwise you might want them to be freely available – they might go ‘viral’ and make you famous!

We will view it and comment and, if you allow us to, we will publish it on the DIY Doctor website.

You have been framed?

Now those of you who have a more evil sense of humour may want to send in videos of your friend/spouse/workmate doing something stupid and funny, while carrying out building work and Home Improvement tasks. We would be lying if we said we don’t want these.

Who doesn’t want a laugh?

So if you spot some idiot tiptoeing on a bucket to reach the last bit of painting on a soffit and you just know they are going to fall off covering themselves in paint, or they are about to drive a digger into a foundation trench, or they are carrying too many bricks and are about to trip over the dog or step in a bucket of plaster, then by all means set the camera rolling.

Send in the results – name and shame the victim!

Email us your Video

Send your video link, your name and contact details to office@diydoctor.org.uk. Don’t forget to tell us whether you want to remain anonymous or not.

In the mean time you might want to watch DIY Doctor’s Mike Edwards on stage at the ideal home show, talking about DIY Disasters.

Tweet

Share via email

We are trying to find out which building jobs you prefer and which tools you value most.

So we have set up a short questionnaire – if you can call two questions a questionnaire!

We will use this information to improve our projects section, and to make sure we are doing the right tool reviews for our tool information section.

So if you don’t mind spending five or six minutes to humour us, please click here to go to our tasks questionnaire.

To entertain you, and get you in the mood for thinking about tools and what you can do with them, here is a video from the incredible German Hammer Juggler – as if juggling with hammers wasn’t hard enough …

Oh and did we mention that if you answer our questions you get a chance to win a complete tool kit, and if you are in the trade you will also get a year’s advertising on DIY Doctor?

If that makes you more interested then click on the link above or you can nip over to our Facebook page, and you will find the survey pinned to the top.

Tweet

Share via email