Terms of use

By reading Home Designing Idea, commenting on it, subscribing to the email or creating an account, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, the site is still free to read, but please do not submit anything to it.

You may read, print and share our articles for your own purposes, including taking a printed page to a builder or a supplier. You may quote a short extract with attribution and a link. You may not republish a guide in full, translate it, or feed the archive into a product without written permission.

The guides describe general good practice. They are not a structural, electrical, plumbing, fire safety or planning specification for your property, and they are not a substitute for a qualified professional who has seen the building.

Dimensions and clearances are given as guidance and are checked against published sources, but standards differ between countries and change over time, and your property may have constraints no article can anticipate. Before work starts, verify anything that affects structure, services, ventilation, fire safety or compliance with a competent professional and with your local authority.

Cost figures are ranges intended to help you judge relative expense. They are not quotes, they are not offers, and they should never be used as the basis of a contract.

Comments are welcome, moderated, and published at our discretion. By posting you confirm that the comment is your own work, that you are entitled to post it, and that it does not infringe anyone else's rights.

We remove comments that are abusive, discriminatory, defamatory, unlawful, deliberately misleading about safety, spam, or posted solely to place a link. Repeated attempts get the account or address blocked. Disagreement is fine and corrections are actively wanted; contempt for other readers is not.

You keep ownership of what you write. By posting you grant us a non-exclusive licence to display it on the site alongside the article, and to remove it. Ask and we will delete your comment.

If you create an account, keep the password to yourself and tell us if you believe it has been compromised. You are responsible for activity under your account. We may suspend an account that is being used to break these terms, and you may close your account at any time.

Articles, drawings, diagrams, cover artwork and the design of the site belong to Home Designing Idea or to the contributors who made them, and are protected by copyright. Photographs supplied by third parties remain the property of their owners and carry their own credit and licence, as set out on the image credits page.

If you believe something here infringes your copyright, contact us with enough detail to identify the work and the page, and we will investigate and act promptly where the claim holds up.

Articles sometimes link to manufacturers, standards bodies and other publications. Those links are editorial and carry no commission. We do not control what sits on the other end of a link, and a link is not an endorsement of everything that organisation does.

The site is provided as it is. We try to keep it available, accurate and current, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted access, and features that depend on the server, such as comments, search and the sign-up forms, may be unavailable during maintenance.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Beyond that, we are not liable for loss arising from decisions you take based on the guides, which is why the section on professional advice above matters.

These terms may be updated as the site develops. The current version is always the one on this page, and continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the revised terms. Changes that materially affect readers will be described plainly rather than buried.

Questions about these terms, including permission requests and copyright notices, go through the contact form. Choose the reason that fits best and an editor will pick it up.