diy – T E Shepherd

Out with the new; In with the old

Thomas — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 22:31:00 +0000

One of the upsides of the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano eruption and the resulting ash cloud has been a cloudless sky, devoid of any vapour trails. Saturday began with a trip into Headington to collect 1920’s original fireplace from Nicola. Having just about fitted it into Emma’s car we headed home and carried it indoors where straight away we saw what an improvement it would be. Then we popped into Bicester to buy our veggies from the market, a cornish pasty and a custard tart for lunch and went for a picnic and potter in the Lyde Garden, Bledlow (via my sis-in-law’s home-to-be in Chinnor).

Following a relaxing amble in the birdsong and sunshine we got stressed out and rudely woken back into the 21st century by a trp to B&Q – we were duped into believing they had affordable fire hearths, when in fact all they sold were cheap and nasty tacky things. Edit: expensive and tacky hearths. So we came home from via our own Homebase where we bought three pieces of Blue/Black Limestone (which we thought was actually slate) to make a hearth and a very large sheet of MDF make a backing for the fireplace. A sheet of MDF so large in fact that it wouldn’t fit in the car and I had to leave my driving license at the desk to be allowed to walk the wood home on the trolley round the ringroad!!

On Sunday, whilst Emma cleaned out the chickies and the bunny I worked on deconstructing the old fireplace and installing the new one, and it looks fab! So, so nice!

The old, an MDF Inca Mausoleum circa 2005…

The new, a 1920s wooden fireplace that cost Â£20 and a half a dozen eggs…

A Summer’s Sunday

Thomas — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:15:00 +0000

I am officially tired. Absolutely shattered. The new door to the garage is up and in place with the new lock. Weâve also planted a second lot of vegetables – I hope itâs not too late – and a delicious sausage and mash with Emma-grown tatties cooked, and eaten…

Oh, and Iâve discovered that … umm, whilst cutting slugs in half with a pair scissors is really quite therapeutic, its even more so to spear them with a tent peg and feed them to the chickens. Yum! Slug kebabs!

Breaking and Exiting

Thomas — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:25:00 +0000

Further to this morning discovery that I was locked out of the indoor-access to the garage, both Emma and I have fiddled and tweaked and coerced the lock to get it open. We’ve tried WD40, we’ve tried brute force, we’ve even tried breaking it down like they do in the movies (don’t try that at home, dear readers, it hurts, and it gets you no where). Defeated by all reasonable means, I eventually had to get the power tools out, and first drill a whole through the door (progressively from small drill bit, and working my way up size-by-size to the largest), before jigsawing around the lock.

I have to say, I kind of enjoyed it, ‘though its not something that I would ever like to repeat. I certainly have new respect for not just locksmiths but thieves. They’re a talented bunch, they are.

Cooking On Cold

Thomas — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:34:00 +0000

Tonight’s meal – a barbeque – was a bit later than originally intended. I had had a productively and pleasingly busy day, first painting some of the garage (after an aborted quest to find a mallet and a need to tidy it) during the hottest part of the day and then mehodical planting of yesterday’s garden centre haul. At the end of it I was tired and grubby and in retrospect should have showered before lighting up the charcoal. Consequently, by the timewe were ready to put the burgers on the fire, the fire was close to being burnt out.

They cooked though, if slow-cooked, and were all all the more delicious served up with new potatoes and salad and eaten in the garden. Washed down with a cold beer, it makes a very satisfactory end to a lovely weekend.

On the sixth day of advent

Thomas — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 23:46:00 +0000

~ Dave The Kitchen Fitter came to see us yesterday evening for a site visit. With our new kitchen just one week away, whilst Em went into work, I set to dismantling the kitchen and de-tiling the kitchen. I had all kind of fears of the tiles coming off and ripping away half the plasterboard with it but in the end they came off with ease. It still took most of the day though to clean it back to a smooth surface and fill in any slight holes and then put everything back for the next week.

~ Tonight was the Bicester Vets Christmas do, and we all gathered at the vets to get a wine and pringle fuelled coach trip into Oxford to go to see Creation Theatreâs latest production – Tales from Hans Christian Andersen back in the mirror tent. It was fantastic fun, and again an incredible display of creativity with just a cast of six characters. Particularly effective was the Little Mermaid, even if it revealed a shockingly different original story to the Disney barstardisation. It made me really want to go home and lose myself in the Hans Andersen tales â but which to read, the Rex Whistler illustrated one, or the one with drawings by Heath Robinson…?

A nice man has just got my business

Thomas — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:41:00 +0000

I’m looking into fitting glass doors to the bottom shelfs of my three bookshelfs. Remembering how the one that I had when I was ‘ickle worked I wanted to do this myself by getting some glass doors cut and then fitting some nice simple plastic track for them to slide on. I’ve been doing sporadic searching on the interweb for various combinations of ‘door track’ to see: a) what its actually known as; b) where you can get it from; and c) how much it might be. You would have thought that in this day and age there would be a diy-type stockist site-thing that would have these sort of things listed.

In the end I got bored of searching, and resigned myself to trying my luck at Homebase in the knowledge that I wouldn’t find the thing I was after and the member of staff that I would find wandering the aisles wouldn’t understand what I was after, and when I had explained it to them would announce that they don’t stock anything like it…

…so instead I persued the glass.

This is where I searched the yellow pages and came up against a company called Bicester Glass – glass while’u’wait amongst other more trade solutions. This sounds exactly what I’m after, I thought, and gave them a call. And what a nice man I spoke to. He knew exactly what I was after and was able to give me aproximate prices for my (very) approximate guesswork dimensions, and knew exactly what I needed/wanted for the track (down to bigger at the top than at the bottom so that you can lift the door up and dop it back down into the track. The prices are reasonable. He’s definitely getting my business.

Good, old-fashioned customer service does still exist, oh yeah!

Productiveness and Bathtime Silliness

Thomas — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:14:00 +0000

Today has been a good and productive day. Although we didn’t get up very early (the second time) that was because we’d already been up for 3 hours and had a good walk, so it didn’t feel too wasteful having brunch later on.

Then, I set to fixing the dining room chair. Yesterday I had deliberately broken it after taking it apart to discover what size dowel I needed to get and discovered that instead of being held together by two screws and 6 lengths of dowel, it was held together by two screws and one piece of dowel that did not protest much at being ‘broken’ out. Anyhow, dowel and drill bit bought I drilled out the old wood and stuck it all back together. Very successful.

Next, came the rabbit hutch. This took longer to reconstruct as I had to saw bits of wood down to the right size after first demolishing the water-logged (and now, if thick, carboard-like) existing roof. Midway through fixing the new roofing felt Em’s schoolfriend Caroline arrived with the children, so I stopped for a carpenter’s tea break, before finishing off.

As Em was cooking dinner, I was going to have rejuvenating bath but discovered mid-way through filling up the bathtub that we had neglected to put the water back on. So I left it half full of cold water to fill up with hot later. Then thought no more about it. It wasn’t till later in the evening when we were watching the first of the Grand Designs Live programmes that there was a loud crash. I went to investigate and Arthur ran away in a hurry. I got to the bathroom and several bottles had been knocked into the water and the floor was splashed with water. Em came through to tell me that Arthur might have hurt himself as he was walking funny…

…actually Arthur was walking funny because he was sopping wet. Arthur you see likes sitting in baths. Empty baths. He must have jumped in, and got a surprise at landing in the water and jumped out the otherside and knocked the bottles off and then run off. Ridiculous animal.

It has to be said that Ronnie agreed with this view completely. He just stared at Arthur with a That don’t impress me much look about him!