So after the excitement of the garden yesterday, today I went and worked on clearing out/up in the garage so that we can get the new car (hopefully Thursday) in to charge. Otherwise we’ll be a bit shafted, really.
After a good few hours work, I turned this:
into this:
Actually, the shelves went up (rather rapidly) as part of the tidying. You can deduce this from the fact they’re
(a) Not strictly level
(b) Made from crappy old offcuts
(c) Put up using really surprisingly poor quality London brackets.
I need to whip the stuff back off the shelves at some point because as you might have gathered I’ve not actually painted that section of wall yet. But with the car coming, as I may have mentioned, on Tuesday, I felt today was not the day to invest time in painting.
I want to get some better quality London Brackets and put up some more shelving on that side, and possibly a bit on this side. I’d also like to spend some ‘quality time’ down there and see if I can’t actually produce something more like organisation (as opposed to randomly hurled on the shelves). Also, I should see if I can’t e-bay some of it, because there’s a lot of stuff there which is just waiting to leave.
I have this horrible feeling I should get rid of the table saw, which would make it the most pointless purchase ever. I thought we’d do much more with it, but in all honestly it wasn’t really the tool that we actually required in the end. Getting rid of it would make a lot of space in there. The chop saw is also out on loan at the moment, which helps.
I could also, realistically, get rid of all the chargers bar the ‘RAC’ one. I’m pained at the thought of getting rid of my ABBSAR charger – because I actually paid for that one – the others all came with the EV conversion stuff for my Minor. But the RAC one is actually probably the best of the bunch. Either that or one of the 12A Fast/Trickle chargers. They could all go on e-bay at 99p…
It was hideously hot down there, not as hot as it was outside though… which made me doubly (or possibly tripley) grateful that I’d organised collecting the hardcore as an evening job. However, in the awesome coolness of Freecycle the hardcore turned out to be a mixture of stone and mortar from a probably 18th century free-stone wall built in Fishponds. Originally it would have been all stone but had been patched up with mortar over the years – the section of wall fell down in a winter storm and the owner, when it was rebuilt, had it done as a modern wall – with lots of mortar. Leaving an awful lot of stone left over. Originally the gap between the garage and the (one and only section of) lawn was to be filled with gravel, and the hardcore was just to make it cheaper, but having seen what we’ve got, it looks like we might well just leave it as it is, because the stone looks like it’ll be quite nice once it’s washed off :)
In other news, with much effort and the use of a Mac app or two, the salvaged section of the car’s service timelapse is now here:
For an experiment with timelapse it was quite painful (should have just got John in) – but despite ending rather abruptly (take it up with Lapse It which doesn’t recognise the camera orientation), and not having sound (because I was too cheap to buy a time lapse application which would add sound having had Lapse It fail, and O Snap also is not looking too clever at the moment).
Unfortunately, whist the heat has led to lots of garden progress, swimming in the sea, and clearing the garage up it’s also coincided with our internet connection getting worse. We’re planning to switch provider anyway, because Be have been bought by Sky, it’s merely a case of getting enough tuits to make a round one. I may reset the router in the morning but for tonight it’s been painfully slow. The poor media server is also running in a very warm laundry room. I’ve opened the door for a bit this evening to give it a bit of a break!
