So, the house is actually progressing. And I did, with some effort, persuade myself to do work on Chester.
Chester, as you may recall, had a failed water pump. I fitted a new one, however, I made a pig’s ear of it. Indeed, possibly more of a dog’s breakfast of multiple pig’s ears. It leaked, not a lot, but a bit after installation. This annoyed me because it was, in essence, a fairly simple job. However, not to be defeated I took the damn thing off again this morning and found that I’d made a hash (of that dog’s breakfast of pig’s ears) of installing the gasket. Somehow, despite my care and attention, I’d managed to ruck the gasket up making a gap (which I’m astonished sealed as well as it did). So, I took the whole lot off, cleaned up the mating surfaces and replaced the gasket with instant silicone gasket. Not best practice but it saved me trying to find the stanley knives* and going to buy some gasket paper to cut a new gasket.
At the moment it appears to have worked. We’ll see, though. I’ve less faith in myself than normal, because I’m waaaay out of practice with this**. Anyhow, it didn’t leak when I refilled it. I will now spend the next two weeks checking coolant.
And then, thanks to a quick tweet to @aminorjourney I found out the height of her desk, which whilst I was dogsitting I noticed was almost exactly 1cm to high for me, which allowed me to do lots of complex calculations about how high my desk legs should be***, then to cut them (I didn’t have the energy to cut the desk supports to the right length). Having done this I sanded and primed them. I’m torn now, because I was originally going to spray them white (or blue to match the walls), but I’ve got a can of black paint sat there, which is a bit bachelor pad, but at the same time, is ‘free’.
Meh.
And now I’m going on a quest to find plastic sheeting (which I know we had somewhere), so I can strip the final section of wall and start filling and sanding in preparation for painting.****
* All of which had disappeared, again, until I finished.
** But if I’m going to build this soon, and since I’ve made a deal to buy a whopping great motor and controller, I suppose I better had, then I best get back into practice.
*** Simple calculations, but a surprising number of them, because it’s made from scaffolding and I needed to work out how much height the joints add.
**** You may be asking about my uni course. Me too. It says my module started on monday but there’s nothing on the course site, there’s no discussion from other students. I have, however, I think got clearance from my work to do the audit; so yay.
