You might be considering changing your carpets for either a laminate flooring or a solid wood flooring (very popular these days). One of the questions that crops up is, how do I mark around pipes, such as radiator pipes or central heating pipes. It could be a boiler pipe, or in your cloakroom or bathroom, it could be the pipe leading from the toilet.

The ideal tool is a contour gauge – straightforward to use, but does take a little bit of explaining. Basically, it’s a series of little thin slices of plastic, held together in an outer frame.

Assuming this was a pipe in your house, you’d push it into the contour gauge like that. It’s now repeated the contour for you. You can now hold it against your flooring, the edge of the flooring. With a pencil, draw around your contour you’ve copied.

There you are, an accurate representation of where you need to cut to insure a neat job.