The DIY/Doing up house Thread (aka My house is falling down)

A bird that's got stuck somehow?

Yeh birds can be surprisingly loud and can get in and out of tiny spaces.

Is it hot where you are at the minute?

Is your house built on an old Indian burial ground?

More seriously though, have you looked in the loft? to see what is up there? If there are no pipes where the sound is coming from, then think again. Is the noise associated with the heating being put on or the hot water?

Could it be debris coming off your tiles and hitting the guttering? As has been said, birds can be noisy, but you tend to hear scrabbling with them more than anything in my experience. Do you have a vent for an extractor (bathroom etc) in the wall that is closing up due to the wind? Do you have a cistern up there with a pump or similar that kicks in noisily now and then? Is it only during windy days? Could it be an aerial rocking? Do you have a chimney or flue in that area and could it be an issue with that (heat expansion)?

Beyond that I'm not really sure.

I can sympathise as this is the kind of thing that would drive me round the bend until I'd found out what was causing it.

I'd be sat up there with a torch waiting for it to happen again.

As far as I can tell, it seems loudest in the corner of the living room, in the ceiling. The spare room is above that. There must be pipes in there for the radiator in the spare room. The boiler is in kitchen which is next to the living room but on the opposite wall to where the sound seems loudest.

One time it happened soon after the boiler had kicked in to heat up the water for the storage tank - This could be coincidence of course but it would explain why it's intermittent and at random times of the day.

My missus was upstairs one time it happened and said it sounded like it was in the loft, however if it was then I doubt it would be so loud downstairs. The loft has the cold water tank for the gravity system.

It's a semi detached 1930s house. My neighbour asked me about the noise - I'm convinced its our side not theirs.

I need to go up the loft later for something anyway, I'll have a shufti and see if there's anything untoward

/killed by trapped seagull

Take a breadbin lid just in case

It might be Les Battersby up there

There is the legend of old steel ships being broken up and midgets skeletons being discovered. Maybe that's it.

I’m having my roof replaced. I’m having a good look at how they’re doing it and it’s definitely not complicated. I’d only take about a year or so if I were doing it alone, plus I’d fall off and die about three dozen times.

Still, if all my get rich quick schemes fail, I can always start a roofing company.

Roofing basically works like this.

Remove slates.
Save any of the old blue Welsh slate that is reusable. Sell to reclaim yard for £££
Put cheaper foreign black slate on roof

Profit.

I had this in my house - it'll most likely be the heating pipes moving, possibly from the pump but more likely just from temperature expansion / contraction.

You'll probably have a run of pipe going along a joist and then turning a corner to go into another room or something, and they'll have cut notches in the joists to run the pipes across them. Sometimes they'll have cut a hole through the joist instead but in my experience that's more an electrician thing. They'll have banged a nail at an angle to stop the pipes moving and it's probably worked loose over the years. The reason it sounds so loud is because the void between the joists is empty and the whole ceiling acts a bit like a drum.

I just wrapped the pipes with insulation where they went over the joist and screwed a clip in to hold them in place - nice and quiet now! You can lay some mineral wool in between the joists if you want to stop the drum effect, but just insulation / stopping the pipes moving will make a huge difference.

Resident piss goblin settling in for the night.