Mostly lemon based

Category: House

  • Quirks

    There are some bits of our house that I adore; not perhaps because of any particularly valid reason, but because they just make me inexplicably happy.

    The porch is fairly understandable. The light (on a sunny day, unlike today) streams in through the stained glass and illuminates the hall in a rainbow of colours:

    It’s obviously popular, because I think all but one or two of the houses on our street that originally had it still have the doors. You can sort of see the red that we’re going for there, incidentally. It’s much deeper and richer when it’s got all the coats on it – and it goes really quite well with the deep red in the stained glass.

    But there’s also odd little corners; little spaces, which I really really like:

    Untitled

    I’m not sure what it is about this little uptick of picture rail, but I think it’s really rather lovely.

    Whilst I’m decorating occasionally I take a few moments to appreciate these little bits of the house.

    In other news I’ve also been spending a little time in the garden, doing some work on the path. It’s crept forwards, or more, backwards, a few more feet.

    I’ve still got a little pile of bricks, but need to attack them with a hammer and chisel to get the mortar off which means I can actually continue path building. I’ve got to enclose a bit more of the deck and put the sort-of sill in where the doors will go under the deck, then we can also gravel that bit, which should make the upper end of the garden feel a bit more finished. I’m suspecting we need another bag of gravel, however, which is a bit sad. Despite that I’ve started roughing out the next section down the hill…

    Although I need to chop up the chunk of timber and decide where we’re switching from gravelled path to recycled pallet wood decking. I’m trying to get on with the garden a bit, despite the fact it’s hot, because otherwise we’ll head into another winter with it unfinished, which’ll make me a sad bunny.

  • I love work, I can watch it all day

    If I weren’t still slightly tediously coldy (and coughy, and going to work tomorrow) then I’d be a lot more angsty about the fact that today has mostly been spent with me doing stuff all.

    The auto electrician was meant to appear at 10, but instead didn’t appear until 1145; so I did a lot of waiting-unproductively; then (and this is my good deed for the day) filed all the paperwork that I’ve not filed for err, months, and also the stuff that we dug up when we were clearing the office (INCOMING GUESTS! PANIC! EVERYTHING MUST BE FINISHED!*). Then I just dawdled around the house doing odds and sods, wrote a teeny tiny bit (maybe 100 words, with some edits elsewhere, I still don’t hate it which remains unusual and is strangely pleasing, at some point I’ll have to show it to someone to see if it’s awful) and intermittently pottered out to see what the auto electrician was up to.

    I’m not entirely sure that the towbar electrics are still working; I’ll have to check that at some point, and one of the sidelights is apparently still wired very oddly (it’s really unclear what in heaven’s name they were attempting to do with the wiring; some stuff seems to just run the length of the car for no apparent reason, duplicating stuff in the loom that appears to be working**). Weirdly, in the middle of all his fixing, the interior light started working, so yay for that.

    Anyhow, once that was done and he’d flagged that the oil pressure switch wasn’t working, I nipped out, got that, installed it, and we now have what appears at the moment to be a functioning car.

    I am still waiting on the shiny exhaust, but for the moment I’ve got the emergency exhaust repair kit and some tools in the boot, and enough spare wire in there to go to Mars.

    All I can do is go for journeys and see.

    Oh, and I found a place that’ll service and check the calibration on the speedo, but the car has to have a non-GPS based speedo so I’ll probably do that at a point when I’m certain I won’t need the car for a bit. Having checked; 20 appears to be at 20 ish, so that’s fine for most of Bristol. It may just be that it needs a service.

    I’ve also blocked out potentially an entire week for agency work which should help with getting the EV conversion going…

    * I will fail at this, but don’t honestly really expect to achieve it, it’s just a ‘wouldn’t it be nice if they turned up and the house was actually finished’.
    ** Maybe rather than running the loom to work out what wires came out where, they just decided to run new ones?

  • Best laid plans of mice and Kate

    So, I’m off on an ALS (Advanced Life Support) course in June. In my usual efficient, non-prevaricatory way I’ve left doing the online portion of the course…a while. I’d vaguely noted that it said that the learning management system would be offline for maintenance for a couple of days but hadn’t really taken much notice of when, exactly. Until today. When my plan for the day which went:

    – Paint
    – Dink on the net
    – Go out for nice lunch
    – Return and do ALS precourse
    – Drink tea, eat biscuits
    – End

    Fell over somewhat.

    I managed the painting; another coat of lovely red paint on the lovely trim. I’m now all the way around the upstairs door frames, which means after one more coat on that frame all that’s left is the trim that I can only prep and paint when Kathryn’s home (because it involves being ‘quite high up’ on a ladder at a slightly dubious angle) and the trim next to the stairs. I’ve even painted the loft-entrance.

    Oh, and patching up the paint on the wall which, as usual, does not seem to have stuck as well as I’d like despite the endless attempts to persuade it to (with plaster-prepping pre-paint stuff, dilute coats, and sensible long drying times). I’m never quite sure how other people get paint to stick to plaster (or if they really do), because while the vast majority of it seems to end up pretty well attached, if I ever put masking tape on paint (which it says you can) it always ends up pulling stuff off. Anyhow. Despite the low-tack masking tape, there were a couple of small areas where the paint’s been pulled off the wall. Some of that is fillered areas, and some of it is just that it hasn’t stuck at all to the plaster. I’ve got some paint from the batch that I kept ready for such an emergency, so I’ll clean the wall up, probably filler it to get it close to the level of the multiple coats of paint and re-prep it and then repaint those little bits.

    The red really adds definition to the upstairs. Or at least, Kathryn and I think it does. Everyone else might hate it. But we really like it.

    Then I set to on the Sepsis cards for work. I’d thought I was happy with the design, but looking at them today I just wasn’t. So I spent some more time modifying the layout before sending them off to the printer. I tweaked it so I could abuse business cards into being the sepsis cards. You can all tell me how much you hate them, but I’m quite pleased with them – in so far as they at least look different to some of the other cards we get at work:

    Sepsis front Unbranded

    Sepsis back

    It’s still not really to the standard I’d like, and the font isn’t quite what I was after, but given I’m not paid to do this, this is my own time, and my own money, then… well. They get what I pay for. The blue is meant to sort of tie it in to the NHS blue, without explicitly stating that. :)

    Anyhow, then I sent them off to be printed. All pray, I did online proofing, rather than taking it to the local Staples, because Staples didn’t seem to want to share their online pricing for printing full-colour double sided business cards. I may get back 100 awful, hideous, unreadable cards. But they looked fine in the preview.

    Anyhow, that done, I did my dinking on the net. Bought myself a network cable and socket tester (and it came with a free crimping tool, which is handy as I’m thinking of extending the cabled network down to the garage*). Anyhow, the excitement of that is I might be able to isolate what’s wrong with the kitchen network point and then I can fix it if I’ve wired it wrong in some way or get a new socket depending. I’m thinking it’s probably a socket because it’s definitely worked at least a bit before. Either that, or something’s eaten the cable, which would make me sad.

    Anyhow, that done I set to on the next problem which was going out for a nice lunch. Easy. Headed over to Hart’s Bakery…only it was rammed. There were no seats at the tables, so I ended up grabbing it and coming home which made me a little sad. I was looking forward to getting some nice coffee and chilling out in a space other than the house.

    Still, when I got home I still enjoyed the delicious bread, and then attempted to log on to the learning management system. And there it was. LMS unavailable until the 29th. ‘Bother’, I think is the word I was looking for.

    On the plus side, after some vacillating about how to spend my newly available afternoon, I headed out to the garden and moved the rest of the soil from the front garden to the back. Distressingly, the new pseudo raised bed astonishingly still requires more soil. I suspected as much, that I might have built a bed that required more soil than we have, but the fact we’ve put around 700 kilos of soil into the back garden (plus about 800kilos of gravel) and we’re still short is a little scary. I keep thinking that the amount of compost, manure, gravel, sand and plain old soil we’ve put in, and the fact that the excavated soil from the garage also went in should really have raised the garden up several feet. But it hasn’t.

    Anyhow, the soil moved, but distressingly inadequately filling the bed meant that I couldn’t do what I’d planned to do, which was put the veg / plants out that’re sat on the windowsill waiting for a new home. We shall have to pick up some more soil to complete the bed :(

    That having slightly failed I set to on another project, which is a mixture of creating a new bed further down the garden, and stripping the last remnants of the lawn off – and moving them to the tiny bit of garden that will hopefully become lawn. It’s right down by the garage and we’ll probably turn it into more of a meadowy affair, but at the moment it’s a mixture of cat-shit and weeds. Oh, and it turns out, potatoes. I yanked a mixture of potatoes and weeds out. Buried the cat-shit a bit, and then started skimming off the grass from the soon-to-be-bed and putting onto the soon-to-be-lawn. Uneven and lumpy though it is, it is a fairly effective (and cheap) solution (although we’ll have to put lots of raked topsoil and grass/wild meadow seed on to it to make it level enough). But it does make that patch look better, and it did so pretty rapidly. Still lots more to do there, though.

    But whilst I was doing it I slightly surprised myself by stumbling on what was perhaps once the edge of a border. It’s a little hard to tell; there’s just a line of bricks running across the garden – edge up – so I’m assuming it’s not a wall – although I’ll need to dig them out anyhow so I will soon find out. It’s quite near to the area of random, inexplicable concrete that was dug up when we started on the garden. I have no idea if it relates to that in some way, or was simply the edging of perhaps a war-time veg bed. It was sufficiently far under the mud that the grass looked quite happy, and I’d no idea that the bricks were there until I hit them.

    So anyway, that was pretty positive. Then it started raining, so I’ve taken shelter inside again….

    * Which leads to the exciting debate: Do I do it properly with armoured direct-bury cable, or do I find some spare old hose-pipe and run the cheap, nasty, horrid (alleged) cat5 cable I’ve got inside that. I’m largely inclined toward the latter, considering I’ve got bloody miles of the craptastic cable, and I’m not going to take it to the US, nor am I willing to inflict it on anyone else because I’m highly unconvinced of it’s actual twisted-pair-ness.

  • The red tide

    *More sleep deprived posting*

    So, I seem to have finally found a way through the incredible inertia which seemed to be preventing me from actually painting the wood trim upstairs. Well, prepping and painting it.

    The main problem was that it seemed like an insurmountably large job. If you’ve ever looked at a 1930’s house, a fairly trad one (not a modernist beastie) there’s more wood in them than you can shake a stick at. Entire forests of carefully turned, shaped and profiled pine cover joints, door frames, skirting and panelwork. It’s fairly fearsome how much trim there is.

    In fact, every time I contemplated the job, or starting it, I felt that sort of sinking ‘how many years is it going to take me to sand that whole thing’.

    But now, now I’ve come up with a plan. I’m doing it a bit at a time. I make a blendable end at the end of each section but have now made it to the second door frame. Sadly there was a bit of a run in my paint on the previous section (gah) and a bit of a run that I didn’t manage to sand smooth enough in the old paint – so I sanded that this afternoon and then redid that section.

    It’s not the ideal way to go about it, but I’m just pleased to be making progress again. And I really like the red upstairs; it adds some definition to what was otherwise a slightly bland space. I love our paint choices but they only really work when the contrasting colours are added :)

    Untitled

  • A lack of indoor commitment isn’t necessarily a bad thing

    It’s a Bank Holiday here in the UK. At least, it is as I write this. This means I could have been being paid in vast lorries filled full of money had I taken it upon myself to do a shift. Thankfully, my phone stayed silent today because otherwise I’d’ve felt very bad about not making myself available for a shift. However, making myself available would have entailed the horror of hiring a car; because Rebecca’s MOT was a bit of a failure. The rear brake cylinders seized when I changed the brake shoes (probably as I forced them back to a point they’ve not had to go back to for a long time). Attempting to un-seize them was unsuccessful – and in the name of time, she’s gone to the garage to have them replace both of ’em.

    Frustrating because I’m currently trying to source a new rear Escort rear axle which will replace the whole troublesome object along with the brakes. So spending money fixing the brakes I’ve got is, well, not ideal.

    Anyhow, so I had the day to kick around at home, and rather than do painting (which I probably should be doing) I instead built a new planter. I made it from scrap chunks of floorboard from the house and a pallet (plus a couple of random offcuts from making the decking). It took me from 11am until about 5pm; including the time to fill the base with gravel and then fill the planter itself with earth:

    A lack of commitment indoors has lead to a new planter outdoors :)

    Unfortunately, having completed it I realised that what I should have done was made it about 60 cm shorter so that I could leave a gap between it and the other one, and you could have had a little path between them. That would’ve been nice. Err, but I didn’t. And it’s now full of soil. So that’s not going to happen.

    I’m not sure how long it’ll last, because the floorboards were already pretty rotten before I started, and the screws I had kicking around were just marginally shorter* than I’d like. It was pretty flimsy putting it together, but once all the panels were screwed together it did that suddenly fairly stiff thing. Which is good.

    Then I more or less hurled the plants from the kitchen in to it. We’ve singularly failed to harden them out properly, but they were getting desperate to be planted out, the soil becoming one giant mass of roots… so I just plunked them optimistically in the planter. The next lot of plants we’ll go back to egg-boxes full of soil; they work better at keeping the plants separate. Still, our neighbour stopped to comment on how nice it was looking, so that was nice.

    Anyhow, then in an exceptional demonstration of restraint (which probably explains why after I did it I ended up spending £35 on a new laptop battery for my laptop**) I did not then come into the house and start sanding the door-frames. I won’t pretend I wasn’t tempted, but I’m trying to be better about not working until I drop, because it has been pointed out to me that it’s not entirely healthy to do that. All the time.

    So instead I swept off the deck, made myself a cup of tea, fired up the chiminea and relaxed.

    Yup. This was a good plan.

    Y’know what, it was bloody brilliant.

    I sat, I dinked on the net (courtesy of our new wifi extender. Yay), I drank my tea and I fed the fire.

    I smell of woodsmoke, but I feel damn good about the day.

    Then we came in and made the most incredible potato salad from ‘Plenty’, and now I’m listening to the fantastic Smoke Fairies album that Kathryn got me (along with their gig) for my birthday (we’ve also listened to another excellent album this evening – by Lyla Foy). I am, quite honestly, having a very pleasant day.

    * Or longer, so I went with shorter because I don’t like the idea of cutting my hand every time I plant something.
    ** Although that might also be related to the fact my laptop battery has a reported capacity of around 2000mAh which is less than half its design capacity and that varies quite a bit; leading to the state of charge plummeting lead-balloon like when it’s unplugged. From full to empty in ~45 minutes.

  • Hey big spender

    It’s been a big couple of weeks for us in some ways. So let’s start with the small change. I’ve finally got back to doing some work on the house. I ‘liquid sanded’ upstairs bannister rail. It took a not insignificant amount of time out of my day. In addition I’ve filled the nicks and cracks in the paint on the kitchen doorframe. I’ve still got to sand it and run a bead of caulking around the door shut, but it’s looking better. It’s actual progress, so I’m not going to complain.

    I also tackled a short section of the picture rail upstairs and a bit of door frame. Unfortunately, I was somewhat short on the old masking tape front, so I didn’t get as far as I’d’ve liked with that. Also, like a lot of things in this world it’s sort of… well, how long is a bit of string. Anyhow, I’ve started. I popped a coat of paint on part of the bannister too, so I get to see what it looks like when it’s done.

    Well, at least, possibly. I still need to paint all the off-white bits, which means buying some off-white paint, so I need to see if the paint I selected meets both our tastes. I’ve no idea what it’ll look like when I paint it on with the red, so we’ll have to test it and see how we both feel.

    But actual progress in this area is good, because it’s been kinda static for a while.

    We also now have a network that extends the length of the garden, more or less. I think it’ll probably just make it into the garage. My phone has network to the garage door, but seems to lose it somewhere in the garage. But I reckon that if I held it up higher it’d work. Which means that it’s probably worth trying to fix the PC in the garage.

    So that’s the small stuff.

    Oh, and I’ve been adding to my story. Another 2 chapters down, which is pretty cool for me. Still no idea if it’s even readable to anyone but me. But hey.

    I’ve also been looking at starting to sort the garage – which means buying a new tool container (probably a rollcab). Which is why I’m currently trying to exercise some restraint because whilst the ones I really want I simply can’t afford (they’re in the 300-400 quid category), I’ve found a ‘direct from the manufacturer’ company that does an adequate looking one that I really quite fancy. It’s still £90 quid though.

    On the other hand, being able to find tools in the garage would be awesome.

    But the big news is that we have finally bought sperm. We had a meeting with the clinic and it seems we’ve finally managed to jump through all the relevant hoops. We are both now considered ready to try and have kids, and thus we picked our donor, after many happy hours on the internet of going ‘uh, no, not him’ we settled on the one we liked. And this morning we transferred an insane amount of money for 1.5 mls of sperm. So, uh, that’s quite exciting.

    And terrifying.

    Mainly terrifying.

    I keep having the “OHMYGODBUTI’MBARELYABLETOADULTNOW” moments, but I’m pretty sure the terror’s a good sign. Of some sort.

    Yes.

    So there’s that.

    Uh, which is why I need to finish decorating the house. Because I always remember a friend at work who bought shelves when their kid was born, and finally erected them when the kid was 17.

  • Knackered

    So, as my best beloved pointed out to me yesterday, I do have a tendency to overdo it. As I collapsed into the bed, exhaustion washing over me I contemplated that maybe I’d gone a bit far with the garden. I’ve been trying to do the path for what seems like a while now (although that’s mostly due to the fact that I spent a lot of time moving soil first, then hurt my arm), and yesterday whilst I wasn’t expecting to finish it, we made a lot of headway in that general direction. So much so that I’ve now run out of bricks.

    Being as it was our weekend off, and the weekend between our respective birthdays, Saturday my mum came up to visit and we pootled out showing her some bits of Bristol and then spending a lot of money (by our standards) on something terribly, terribly exciting.

    A sheet.

    And some pillow cases.

    Yes, you know you’re truly no longer one of the youf when the prospect of a brand new sheet is something quietly thrilling*.

    Then we slid down to the garden centre and bought her birthday / new year presents. Which proved to be dangerous as we brought back some plants for ourselves, too. Including an insanely fluffy little alpine that’s now in the rockery.

    The evening, after my mum had headed home, was spent at a gorgeous restaurant which we’ve visited before called ‘Flinty Red’. It serves incredible food, and was the cause of much delight. Then we wandered down to Be.in Bristol to catch some music and relax before heading home…

    It turned out not to be the group I thought it was, but a pair of musicians who play under the name Paruski. I’ve not seen them before, they have no webpage that I can find, and mercilessly thieve from Russian and Celtic sources to produce entertaining medleys whilst wandering around the bar, out onto the street, up and down the stairs.

    It turned out to be great fun, and something I was reminded that we should do more of.

    Then Sunday we attacked the garden. I was, it turns out, somewhat overzealous (not realising how exhausted I was until I slumped into the chair after dinner); which is something I need to learn to not do to myself. Partly it didn’t help that I got myself into a bit of a war with a tree that I want to fell. It’s not a proper tree, but one that’s been chopped down each year and has therefore managed to make fairly solid roots whilst actually being fairly titchy on top. I’d been about to sit down and stop and then got distracted and, well, wore myself out digging and yanking on the tree. I was in fact so bloody tired that I’m still knackered today.

    However, the path is way further down the garden which is pleasing. Also, following some discussion with my best beloved, we have a modified plan for the lower section of the garden, which should be rather pretty and involves my favourite (free) building material. Pallets. Yay.

    The other nice thing about having the paths creeping around is that they delineate the beds, giving me, at least, a better idea of where everything is going to go.

    Today has mainly been a shopping and realising that I over did it yesterday day; although I’ve put the belt onto the Dyson DC07 and practiced the various instruments again.

    I've been tormenting the ivories again...

    Uh, so it’s been pretty busy and there has been progress, but perhaps I need to be a little more… gentle with myself.

    * To be honest it’s about time. Our linens are something of a disaster area, with there being few sheets (err, three) that fit the bed. Two of those sheets are over 20 years old and essentially transparent they’re so thin, and one is just a teensy bit short, I think it may have shrunk in the wash. The other sheets (all, sadly, newer ones) – one ripped as it was coming off the bed a while ago and the fitted ones don’t fit the new mattress as it’s thicker than they allow for.

  • One of those days

    Not, oddly, one of those days where you wonder about whether your continued existence on the planet will ever produce anything tangible and worthwhile, or whether you are instead doomed to spend the entirety of the rest of your life looking at cat pictures on the internet*.

    No, today was one of those super productive days.

    I’m wondering if I need to write myself a to-do list for every day when I’m not working because the effect was astonishing.

    On my list was the following:

    – Clean some house
    – Practice Guitar
    – Practice Piano
    – Order power supply connector
    – Bottle cider
    – Garden
    – ?Print sepsis card

    And apart from the sepsis card all of it got done and some other bits and bobs. Also I listened to lots of music, which is a bonus.

    (more…)

  • More devilishness

    Today’s been a bit of a slog, really. Although quite a rewarding slog.

    Instead of my normal get-up -> shower -> do stuff process I decided to instead go straight out, after breakfast, into the garden and commence attempted to destroy my limbs further. After a few hours of work I was able to decide it was lunch time (I really needed it to be lunch time, I had started to feel a bit muzzy and faint, which is what happens when I keep delaying lunch) and I was able to look back at a chunk of path.

    The brickwork around the pond-to-be is a bit iffy, because it’s just sat there. I’m not quite sure what to do about that at the moment, because we’ve no pond to put there, so I can’t attach them to anything. I do slightly wonder if we should abandon the pond, but then the rockery will look very silly, since it’s a rockery with a waterfall planned into it.

    Anyhow, having cleared up I headed off quite excitedly to do food shopping… I was mainly quite excited because there’s a new cafe I wanted to try… I then was quite disappointed to find that my trip to do the food shopping did not allow me to try the new café on Gloucester Road, because their temporary opening hours are only Thursday to Saturday.

    Still, I had a nice salad at Café Ronak.

    Then I came home and sussed out the right piece of software to make the FlyTouch actually useful (although it fell over at 11.64 Gb of music scanned; and restarting it didn’t get me anywhere immediately). Unfortunately, the flytouch then started whining that the battery was nearly flat. My first thought was that I needed to plug in the charger… then I realised it was already plugged in. Then I took it out of the stand and played ‘wiggle the connector’, then I felt the charger and was highly suspicious of the cheap charger that came with the flytouch being stone cold. So I dug out the volt meter and… it’s dead. Of course.

    I’ve (handily) another of John’s Special Power Supplies kicking around, so when I’ve dug up my instructions for that I’ll rewire it for the correct voltage and we should be sorted. Apart from the fact I need a new stereo-to-stereo cable to connect it to the radio. Incidentally, if anyone comes across either a TV22

    Bush TV22
    (via Radiocraft)

    or a Sony TV 8-301

    Sony TV 8-301
    (via Njarc)

    I’d quite like one to build either a music / video player. No idea where it would live, but I’d quite like one. The little portable Sony’s probably more sensible than the TV-22, but I’ve always wanted a TV-22.

    In other news, the Morcheeba CD that I picked up at Amnesty is awesome. I’d forgotten how much I like Morcheeba, and that I really should have more of their music. Also, I should restart the CD ripping process. And the DVD ripping process. Especially since our DVD player seems to have died. It’s still working as a CD player, but as a DVD player it fails mid-disk.

  • The Desired Effect

    So my earlier post had the desired effect and got me off my butt.

    Today I:

    – Pruned the raspberries, and had a bit of a tidy of that bed.
    – Finally ‘dug up’ the potatoes (emptied out the large pot). I can’t say it was a raging success (because it wasn’t), but I can say that we have some yummy looking pots.
    – I planed the door. It doesn’t fit, but it’s so damn close. The house being the insane unsquare object it is (which delights me much of the time, but is also quite frustrating), the door frame is a full 2cm narrower at the bottom than it is at the top. There’s only so much you can do to hide that. And despite a full shopping bag worth of shavings from my planing, it’s still a couple of mil out. I’d’ve finished it but my arms are completely knackered and I needed to stop to cook dinner. Irritatingly, the amount of time it took to plane was fine, I could have got it done, but letting in the hinge into the door takes me a bit longer. Although I can proudly say I did the whole job properly; or at least, I will have. I got my chisel out, I got my plane out and I did the whole job carefully and surprisingly slowly. I even stopped rather than rushing to try and complete the job, which I’m quite proud of.
    – I also did the dishes, loaded the dishwasher, and hoovered up after myself.

    Go me.