Mostly lemon based

Category: House

  • Bother

    So, this was going to be a happy clappy selfcongratulatory post. I was going to glee about my desk a bit more (and I’ve managed to find the phono adaptor, so I just need to actually make the record deck work and get it a stylus), and I was going to glee a bit about the path:

    Pathing

    I’ve also found the Mic, which means that once the record deck’s working there’s a possibility that I might, just might, do a new Dead Bug Jumping in the not so distant future.

    And all that glee was shiny.

    And then I lent back in my 1900s office chair. I lent back, the spring took the weight happily, and… I looked up.

    We had the ceiling replaced in this room because it had water damage. Despite weeks and weeks of rain, the plaster on the old ceiling had remained dry. There was no evidence that it was still leaking, and every suggestion that it’d been repaired. I looked up at the white strip of the wall above the picture rail.

    I looked up and there is a streak of dirty brown dried water-related evidence. It means getting up in the attic and grovelling around in the newly laid glass fibre. It means trying to work out where the water’s coming in. It means expense getting someone in to fix a roof*, because that is beyond my skillbase.

    Arse.

    * I’m presuming. But I want to know what’s wrong before some lying shite tries to tell me the whole roof needs replacing. Irritatingly it’s near enough to a valley on the roof that it might be that… feh.

  • Post nights productivity

    So, 2 nights at my new hospital trust. The second night ended on that special kind of high available only when a drunk/high patient attempts to assault you. You’ve got to be quick to work in the ED, and thankfully, last night I was quick. Their kicks and punches (for there were two of the delightful souls) never connected.

    I then cycled home. Two 12 hour ED night shifts, and I’m proud to say I did not shirk my cyclingsponsibilities. I cycled to and both of them, and after a couple of weeks of use the brakes are finally starting to work fairly well and I’m not needing to adjust them after every ride. This is because the wheels are starting to look somewhat smoother, although the small amount of chrome that the rear wheel was sporting has started to flake off in some areas (other areas are disconcertingly shiny). The one frustrating thing is that a company in the states sells the ‘salmon’ Kool-stop brakes on rod-brake shoes, which is not something I’ve seen over here. And I remember the Salmon coloured Kool-Stops for their effectiveness on my old mountain bike. However, I will say that the Fibrax brake shoes are a hell of a step up from the unbranded ones I picked up first.

    Anyhow, so I cycled home, cut the two final chunks of scaffold pole for my desk and painted them (I decided on the same 1829 Antique White of the skirting, rather than Bachelor Pad Black), and tided the kitchen. Then I chilled out, had a bath, and then wandered down and applied the second coat of paint. Then I started laying the path down the garden. This is a depressingly massive undertaking, the path not being a simple straight run down of about 40ft, oh no. No it curves down the garden and has a split off to a path that will run parallel for part of the stretch. Fortunately for me, I’m not a big fan of perfectly flat and smooth brick paths. Uneven is something I rather like, so I don’t have to get it all perfectly flat before laying the bricks. Nor am I terribly hassled about pulling weeds up from the path now and then, so it’s basically cutting a roughly flat channel through the grass and getting the bricks bedded down roughly flat. Curves though, now they’re an unthought-of evil.

    Anyhow, Kathryn then got home and we headed out to Riverside Garden Centre, where several plants wanted to come home with us. Quite a few of them. As did a big pile of earth. The reason for this was that we’ve been intending to turn one of the pallets on which ‘something’ arrived into a vertical planter. And after much delay today we did that. Photos to come. Then Kathryn planted more plants, I dug a big hole and we planted the Gooseberry (which has been stuck in a pot for an entire year). Kathryn weeded, I laid more path.

    Then we started digging over another bed-area.

    Then tiredness struck, and now it’s time for bed :) Still, 30 hours awake and still vaguely coherent, that’s quite impressive :)

  • Bonus prevarication (getting the stress out)

    So. I’ve got 1500 words to write through this next week (in which I’m on nights). Those 1500 words? They are on a subject that I know about in loose, nursey, I know how to treat it and roughly what the guidelines say* way, but not in a deep ‘I know what the papers say and where they are strong / weak’, so…uh, yeah, I need to read them. Now. Fast. Also, I need to know about audit. I know approximately >< that much about audit processes. I mean, I know what it is and roughly how to carry one out, but I don’t know how to pick one audit method over another. And the book I need? In the post. Maybe. *WAIL*

    On top of which, I start a new job in 11 days time****, to get to which I need to ride my bike (to get it out of the garage, I need to go through a gate that currently has no handle). So it would be useful if (a) My bike had a reflector on it (being as it’s legally required ‘n all) and (b) the gate had a handle on it, so as I can open the gate in the morning to get to work.

    Also, I need to proof read and improve (it definitely needs some improvement) the 3000 word literature review that I’ve written (on a different topic to the 1500 word one, obviously).

    And…our illustrious Volvo has, having destroyed its radiator and been fitted with a new one, decided that at 100,000 miles he’d rather like a new water pump. So the expensive nice coolant I bought to fill the brand new radiator is now slowly gracing the road surface outside our house as it drip-drip-drips its way out of the car. The new pump was only 12 quid (including delivery) – and wasn’t difficult to source – but is, I suspect, going to be an arse to fit and will, I suspect, require a chunk of time that I don’t currently feel I really have available to install.

    On top of all that…my beloved minor’s rebuilt differential, which has always been a little whiney, has decided (I suspect) to shred at least one of its bearings. She’s very, very whiney now and I changed the oil a few days ago wondering if I’d cooked it or it’d leaked out or somesuch. Normally diff oil is pretty much the same colour as it went in, but more runny**. It’s normally yellow (and smells pretty foul, EP90 does). It came out opaque grey. Opaque grey is not a suitable colour for oil coming out of a diff. Nor is the noise it’s making. All that grey used to be ball bearings.

    I’m waiting to find out if it’s still under warranty or if I’m going to have the fun and excitement of getting it re-rebuilt locally (we won’t think about that).

    Oh, and I *was* planning to have my GT550 up and running so that I could use that to get to work in a pinch. Have I done that…? No.

    As the final little set of stressors, I still have no desk, my laptop’s screen is getting flakier and flakier (once I’ve done these two essays I’m going to bite the bullet and take it down to Apple), and the house is no further along than it was a month ago. I am, as it were, ready for the world to chill out a bit.

    Right at this moment I’m feeling a teeeeensy tiny bit stressed.

    * Although, having just read the most recent Cochrane review I’ve just discovered, as with so many things in medicine, we’ve been doing it wrong. See, we (as in the medical profession) largely seem to have assumed that when people are sick sick (Looky here) we should throw all the antibiotics in the universe at them to make them not be sick. New research says, uh, don’t. It says yay to antibiotics but boo to the kitchen sink approach. I need to read it more thoroughly, but my glance at it says giving people multi-antibiotic therapy (which is what, I think, all the protocols I’ve ever seen say) is worse than just giving them one specific kind of broad-spectrum antibug. Basically, you roger their kidneys***. Like with oxygen, and so many other things that seem sensible, when you actually test it turns out you’re wrong, wrong, wrong. Arse. Also, the Number Needed to Harm is 4-5 patients. So of the many, many people I’ve given that to over the years….oh lord. This is the problem with doing research, it’s depressing.

    ** This is because the long-long-long chains that make up the thick goopy stuff that goes into a 1960s differential slowly gets chopped into teeny, tiny, shorter chains. But there’s no soot (which is what turns the oil black in an engine).

    *** As in screw them, permanently. This is bad.

    **** While it’s the same job, at the same pay, in the same kind of department I now get ‘Senior’ in my job title. Wahey!

  • the perils of early adoption

    It’s fairly rare that I’m an early adopter. Not for want of trying, but instead because for the most part I can’t afford to get new toys. When I switched from Acorn computers to PCs I was well behind the tech curve not because I wanted a scabby old AMD processor, but because the new Athlon & board was so far out of my price range it was laughable. I have occasionally been an early adopter. DVD springs to mind, I was quite quick off the mark with that (my 1st Gen DVD drive for the computer was region free because region coding post-dated the drive)*.

    Generally, not so much though. I run a Mac that’s now a couple of years old and am generally pretty happy with it**. The change to an LCD tv came about purely because we didn’t want to fill a big chunk of this room up with a pointless big box. But, digitised music? That I did early on.

    Whilst I love my vinyl collection, the simple availability of all my music on one box, and the ability to throw it from there onto (now) my iPhone (but back then stacks of ‘mix CD-Rs’ was instantly appealing to me. My first MP3s were ripped using the original port of a command line program to the Risc PC. The Risc PC literally spent more than a day encoding one track. When later versions came around (versions which didn’t take a day to encode a track) I ripped the odd CD (but it was always painfully slow on my Risc PC).

    As soon as I had a PC I started ripping tracks more effectively, and when I started working from home brought the sheer might of ‘time at home’ to bear on the problem. I ripped every track on every CD. I killed at least 2 CD Burners in the process just because there were so many disks. I spent hours typing track names in because the few music databases that existed were small and inadequate, or didn’t have any of the UK versions of disks in.

    It was slow and generally a bit painful.

    It lives in my memory as a slow torment.

    And now I might have to repeat it. Not because I’ve failed to transfer data successfully, but simply because TuneUp has singularly failed to fix the many and manifold problems that exist in my music collection. See, there are tracks ripped at hideously low bit rate. That I accept is purely an unfixable. But the lack of album artwork, the somewhat variable naming policy, the failure to fully complete some of the tags… some of that’s down to me. Some of it’s because I have vinyl of some albums and thus downloaded digital versions, and the person who ripped them made an arse of naming the files.

    @pinkemma suggested that I should re-rip them all, anyway, as FLAC. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t support FLAC (obviously) and the VMP74 doesn’t support Apple’s lossless format. So, uh, yeah. Seems to be a lose-lose situation there. Feh, is generally my feeling on this at the moment.

    And don’t tell me about Cloud computing. Given that the computer won’t even sync my calendar across to iCloud you think I’m going to trust you with music, one of the most important things in my life?

    Bah. And possibly humbug.

    Still, Ug made fire today, so that’s cool :)

    Ug make fire. Ug happy. ;)

    * Although I did take great pleasure in watching my DVDs on my first generation colour TV (A Mark 1 Ferguson Colourstar).
    ** Issues with iCal and the fact it desperately wants more memory notwithstanding.

  • High impact interventions

    So, in the last week since being sick I’ve endevoured to make some progress, and regain that lost inertia towards finishing the house. It’s not really worked, perhaps part of this is the low impact of many of the jobs on the list.

    Whilst the skirting is all but done (I need to bring a small bit up from the garage, see if it fits, and attach it if it does, then attach the final (already cut) run); much of it sits behind the bench (not finished) and the table and it’s impact is largely dissipated. Indeed, I barely notice it. Which I suppose is sort of a good thing. It needs some decorator’s caulk run around the edges, but essentially done. Also, I cut the picture rail, and have put it up. It also makes the room look more finished, but doesn’t really do massive things.

    There’s some filling to do around that too, and some filling on the walls. But really, it’s difficult.

    I’ve painted much of the garage having removed the mould too, and done this:

    On the plus side, phase one of desk construction is drying :)

    Which is the first part of my desk for upstairs. That led to this, unfortunately:

    Arse.

    Which I’ve now hopefully repaired….

    However, today I started putting paint on the walls of the stairs. I know, starting a new job when the old one isn’t done yet. Bad, bad, bad. But the painting’s coming, and our kitchen heaters are running 20 hours of the day trying to heat the entire stairwell as well as the hall and the kitchen. It felt good. P’raps this will stun me out of my inertia.

    Anyhow… nights again this week :(

  • I know, I suck at updating

    So. Yes. Update.

    I’ve mainly been on nights, y’see. And Kathryn’s mom was here (which was lovely, I wish it could have been longer – it went far too quickly). And yeah. So. There has been progress.

    The worksurfaces went in* and I started the tiling around the worksurface to provide a splashback. This was done by chopping our floor tiles roughly in half (not quite, because asthetically we liked approximately 3/8ths of a tile). As I pootled through the (many) tiles required, I thought:

    “Gosh, for a cheap tilecutter** this has done pretty well, just a few more tiles and then the bathroom and it’ll all be done”

    One can, if one isn’t me, see what happened next. Literally, next. Literally the next tile. Part way through the tile, the power tripped. Hrm, I thought, and wandered out clicked it back on, vaguely wondering what had tripped it (since it only previously occurred when we’re using the iron, and even then, not that often). I sat down in front of the tiler, switched it on again, and lo out came the magic (and acrid) smoke. I don’t think I’m overstating it to say I was a trifle upset.

    Having seen what was available, I headed back to B&Q to get essentially the same crappy tile cutter, which has got less good. In fact, the blade supplied was completely awful – so bad that the old blade from the old saw was better than the new one.

    Anyhow, many more tile cuts later and:

    Slightly less than half way...
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  • Quickie

    So, another day in the life post of renovation. When we started this project we had an unrealistic timescale, more because of initial difficulties getting a builder than any specific schedule issues; then expenses went a bit, well, I probably shouldn’t have built the garage… Which meant that we had to prep and paint the walls, which rather dramatically added to the time it’s taken to do the house; but honestly? I suspect our standards for the wall are somewhat higher than any builders would have been. The hours spent filling and sanding have really been worth it.

    Annnyhow. Between the MSc (although I’m really rather worried about passing this blog section – the time allotted for each section’s been so short and i’ve really no clue how to write at MSc level in a blog…) and working on the house it’s been slow but steady progress here.

    Kathryn’s still beavering away on the upstairs bedroom. We finally managed to find something of what we were after for he bookshelves / bedframe. This has been somewhat of a challenge. The original plan was to make shelves that’d disassemble into a bedframe; this plan was flawed in the amount of time it’d take and the amount of time it took me to source our workshop tools (more on that in a bit). In the end we settled on old orange boxes. My dad once used these to build a bookcase (still have it & use it, actually); so when Kathryn’s concerted online lookage located some we gave in and bought them. Hopefully they’ll do the job!

    Having spent most of the week plumbing or cutting the plinth boxes, we spent 7 (sodding) hours making the cabinets on one side of the room level. The floor, it turns out is dramatically off level; and the cabinets which are at either end of the room have a single span of worktop to go on them. Thus they need to be both horizontal and close enough to the same height as to work when the worktop is applied. Also, my tile laying is attractive and neat but still not level. The cabinets, it turns out, bespoke they may be, but the same size they are not. And the cabinets need small amounts of shimming to sit perfectly on the bases, otherwise they twist subtly and the doors become unlevel. So it was less simple than you might imagine. It involved an awful lot of offing and onning of the cabinets, which was easier on this side than it is on the side with the sink and macerator in. But that unit is level, just needs shimming, and everything else will have to damn well work around it, because I’ve plumbed in the macerator/pump. Also, obviously we don’t want to throw into stark contrast just how unlevel the floor actually is – so spent time discussing just how much of a massive gap there should be under the unit at the lowest point of the floor compared to the unit at the highest point (which is actually sat on its base, not its feet at the back of the unit to get it as low as possible).

    IMG_1239

    In the end we settled on not quite perfect, but within a 5mm of where it should be – that drop is spread across about 80cm of dishwasher (which is also not level, but much lower than the worktop) in which area there is no unit. The idea being that that’s the only place we can hide the unlevel. The sink, obviously, is pretty much bang on level (after much effort) and so we couldn’t hide it behind that :-/

    It makes sense to us, but we’ll have to see what our illustrious cabinet maker says when he comes to measure up and fit the worksurface. It is, it must be said however, the pretty.

    I’m also very fond of our salvaged art-classroom sink:

    IMG_1240

    It may be battered, and the inside’s a bit scraped up (and still needs a lot more scrubbing) but it’s such a nice shape. Unfortunately, the waste on it (a) doesn’t have an overflow hole and (b) leaks, which isn’t surprising but I will have to cut it off with the dremel to replace it, which is a bit tedious. I had hoped (at least in the short-to-medium-term to get away without replacing it). I can also say that it was with deep joy that the dishwasher was plumbed in* and has now produced plates that are free of grit. Not that the plates we washed weren’t free of grit, it’s just neither of us could really face the uphill struggle of washing all the plates we own – at least, not until we had a functioning sink. And whilst they might get dusty again, you can cram most of the plates into one dishwasher load so having them all clean again now is quite a pleasure.

    That, however, is pretty much all I’ve done. I’ve tiled the floor, which now needs washing & sealing today and then grouting tomorrow (lucky me!). I need to do that because the edges of the tiles have started to crumble a bit again. We bought a lampshade for the dining space, which I put up yesterday. It’s a 1930’s industrial enamel shade; and whilst the colour doesn’t exactly match the room, the shape is perfect, and I love it all the same :)

    We still, however, haven’t found an answer for the kitchen lighting.

    We’re considering kilner (aka mason) jars with energy savers in on a bit of painted wood. Yes, I know. It’s been done. We’re stealing ideas. Yes, yes, shush. It’s cheap and we’ve not yet found a solution we like, so it might be worth trying.

    In other news, I spent yesterday unbending our battered tablesaw which arrived after a fight with the courier. Having heaved the (heavy) object down to the garage with Kathryn I spent about an hour getting the point where the legs attach to the frame bent back enough that it’d fit together and fitting it together. I also attempted to glue the little height adjusty handle back together, but I fear that really needs replacing**.

    IMG_1241

    Hopefully we’ll be getting a refund of shipping and some money off the saw. It’s nice though, and it does work. I’ve not quite got the guard adjusted right, and I’m way out of practice with table saws… and let’s be honest, the last time I used one was 20 years ago (scary thought) in woodwork in secondary school. And that wasn’t a toy dinky tablesaw like this one, that was a massive piece of woodcutting machinery.

    I also spent some time toying with the drill press. I had hoped to use it to make the shelves for the lounge, but neglected to take account of the length of the drillbit (duh) when calculating the minimum height required. As with the tablesaw it’s had a pretty hard life, and the Jacob’s chuck is very sticky (I think I might need to whip it off, clean it and lubricate bits of it). It’s also missing the switchplate, so you have to switch it on and off at the plug, or as I ended up doing by pulling the plug out (because I have it on an extension lead. That’s less than ideal, so I shall have to find a little piece of metal and make up a new switchplate for it, and find a new switch, at some point. But at any rate, it’ll hopefully do for building the shelves, if not then we can flog it again :)

    It’s rather nice having the stuff down there, but I need to spend some time (probably with Kathryn or the help of a friend) sorting it all out once the house stuff’s out of there, because at the moment it’s quite irritatingly disorganised.

    And finally yesterday, I took Miss M Lane (which I think might be the bike’s name) out for a little spin. No, not the motorbike (no, I know, I’m bad for still not having sorted her), but the pushbike:

    IMG_1243

    It wasn’t much of a spin, really. About half a mile, really, in total. Not because I wanted to only go half a mile, but let’s just remind you about my lovely BSA:

    IMG_1244

    It is still running on ‘War Grade’ tyres, and possibly ‘War Grade’ innertubes & It needs new brake shoes. So the intention wasn’t to go far anyway… unfortunately, having made it across the vicious stones at the back of our house, and both up and down the street, I made it to a little distance along the river before hearing ‘quite a loud’ bang followed by sudden deflation of the rear tyre.

    The main purpose of the ride was to discover what needs doing, and what needs doing is:

    The 3 speed changer needs looking at. It has more than one speed, but seems to change between them fairly much at it’s own discretion, and I’m not sure if it was jumping teeth.
    The brakes quite definitely need doing (the front brake is laughable, even with adjusting it).
    It does, indeed, need new tyres (sadly) and new innertubes (especially because one now has a massive hole in it).

    On the plus side, she’s really a rather lovely bike:

    IMG_1245

    ** And it’s at this moment that we realise that John having a bandsaw on which he can cut a nice circle is a very, very handy thing indeed :)

  • Just a brief kitchenalia comment

    So, the project over the next two weeks is to complete the kitchen/dining space. At the same time as doing my MSc. I’m not very good at balancing these things, and may have to switch around to ‘MSc first then do stuff on kitchen’. Mainly because I’m knackered come the evening when I settle down on the sofa to do my MSc. Today I’ve brought coffee.

    However, there has been progress. I’ve levelled the base units (although the one I thought I’d finally fitted I’m now thinking could do with a smidge more adjustment).

    Base unit leveling

    I’ve also painted the bit visible between the cabinets and the cooker…. Irritatingly I was about 1/4″ out on the right, and it was just under the outlet for the cooker that I missed thinking it’d be hidden by the cooker, but it isn’t. Still, took two minutes with a brush.

    The dining space is now blue and white. The blue is not a colour that either Kathryn or I love, it’s nice enough, but it doesn’t go perfectly with the Orange at the far end of the room. However, having stood debating kitchen colours, only able to find colours that weren’t available as kitchen paint that we got remotely excited about, we found this paint on special offer at better than half price. Suddenly, we fancied this blue…

    Anyway, I’m deeply overjoyed with the painted brick industrial-style look. Let’s say that it speaks to the heritage of the area, linking the site’s manufacturing history to its current domestic use. Or something :)

    Blue!

    I’ve also been routing out access panels in the back of the cupboards. This was going to be done by our cabinet maker, but he was pushed for time, and if they didn’t get installed today then, well, things start to get very tight because Kathryn’s mom’s here in 3 weeks. And there’s currently no floor in the dining area. Anyhow, having explained ‘how he would do it’ (which was actually very helpful) and lent us his ‘palm router’ (which isn’t palm sized, really, but is very, very nice). I followed instructions and made a couple of very nice holes.

    Routed hole

    Anyhow, also in the news, we now own an ancient (but not here yet) NuTools drill press, a similarly old Naerok Table Saw (also not here yet), some corner clamps, some sash clamps, a very nice Makita jigsaw (and associated 110V powersupply). Can I just say that the Makita is probably one of the loveliest tools I own. Also, my drill is beginning to sound a bit tired, I’m hoping it will last out this process, but have known B&D drills to eat bearings occasionally.

    Oh, and I don’t intend to use Instagram to post pictures from now on, it’s just they were conveniently uploaded :)

  • Rewarded with tired

    So, today was a bit of a disaster, in some senses. I was, it appears, meant to be at work for an Early shift. I discovered this 2 hours after the start of the Early shift. Having fled to work at speed, unshowered and feeling distinctly grotty I stumbled through the shift, making countless small errors (I took a patient to the ward having forgotten to update their obs chart for an hour. Having put them on a monitor and carefully monitored them. Doh).

    I then trundled home, stopping at B&Q to find out how much our awesomely exciting voucher that they gave us when we moved in was worth. It said ‘Up to £2500!’ on it. That, we thought, unlikely though it is, would be enough for a kitchen. Hell any significant amount would have been quite helpful with the kitchen. See, we have a problem with the kitchen which is… well… we’re not exactly sure what we want to do.

    We’ve gone through period(ish) units (as in, either English Rose / Paul Metalcraft etc) re-sprayed in a modern colour; period wood furniture of various origins repurposed and reworked into kitchen units, commodity cabinets with custom doors, a commodity kitchen, brick pillars with wood-framed doors inset. As you can see we’ve been deeply decisive. So I was kinda hoping that, while I have no great love for B&Q kitchens, if they turned out to have given us 2.5k towards a kitchen it would have been easy(er) for us to decide.

    But they didn’t. So tomorrow we’re off to look at some sale ‘standard’ units, and see what we think of them.

    The issue is, of course, becoming more pressing as the room that will be the kitchen has become closer to completion. I spent an enjoyable few hours under the floor adding in extra plumbing after we somewhat suddenly decided that we actually would rather like to have a second sink on the opposite side of the room to where we put the main sink. This was inspired by finding this in a salvage yard:

    IMG_0571
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  • Progress!

    So, the builders are back, and thus we have progress. Also, I’m on holiday as of today, and have celebrated by setting myself as ‘available’ for an inordinate number of shifts of agency work. I also had a bit of a grovel under the floor, too. But I’ll get to that in a sec.
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