I went to my chapel of prayer this lunchtime. I wanted to buy some timber. No. Not wood. Timber. Tiiiiimmmmm baaaaaah! I also needed to get some keys cut. I managed to get someone to help me with my key cutting, but the guy operating the machine had a habit of repeating the error messages on the screen as though somehow that would solve his problems. Eventually he managed to restart the key cutting machine, clean it, recalibrate it and make my first key. Then, he got very confused about which key was which, getting to the second, and even went off in search of the wrong blank - luckily his habit of saying everything out loud managed to help me avert this mistake.

Sadly, the right blank wasn't in stock, so I'm one key short of a spare set. That's a nice euphemism for this chap too... though I must point out that he was a nice guy and tried to be helpful. As a result, I was gentle and tender with him, rather than impatient and snappy. I took my one key and was confident that I was a step further towards my spare set... though I'll have to get another done somewhere else before I need the spare set, on Monday at the latest.

I went off in search of some floorboard material and couldn't find, in the general stock of floorboards, the size I wanted - 170 x 20. So I asked someone. Then he made me ask someone else. That person basically said that they didn't stock the size I wanted, though there were some 169 x 20.5. We're talking mm here. So I bought that. Seriously, does anyone think that someone's being a bit picky there!? I wanted to have the 3.6m length cut before I failed to get it in my car. Nobody was around to use the big sawing machine, and it would appear that that machine isn't really to be used for floorboard. So they lent me a handsaw.

How manly is that!? Handsawing my own timber in a B&Q!?

I felt under scrutiny. Nobody was watching, but my handsawing isn't incredibly impressive.

Still, the timber is in my car, and I'm now sitting in eager anticipation of my order of 300 woodscrews to put this wood down with.

Oh yeah. Tonight's going to be a boner.

Labels: DIY

I worked very hard on my kitchen/bathroom this Saturday. I had a hard hat a ladder, a breathing mask, a wrecking bar and a lot of energy to expel. The day started with a proper builder's sandwich at Homebase, where I had to buy some caps to cap off the slightly leaking water pipes, that were the result of poor valves leading to the disconnected washing machine.

I proceeded to cap off a few watery things, and then, when that didn't go wrong, I started pulling down the ceiling. It's all down, pretty much.

Ceiling down, I was able to survey the wall to the bathroom. The wall wasn't holding up the room, so I started to take it down.


Divided it stood

After some consultation with a friend of mine, we decided that even the lintel, crossing from the interior wall to the exterior wall couldn't be held responsible for holding up the roof. So it came down, then the internal wall, pretty much, came down. A lot of smashing with hammers and throwing around of bricks. The result was quite a difference.


Undivided it fell

I made a lot of rubble. A lot of rubble indeed.


A multitude of rubble

Periodically I'd do some clearing up, which wasn't especially fun. Around lunchtime I had to go out for some rubble sacks. I bought 30. I've used 25 of them already and there are more to use tonight. I went to a nearby garden centre for the rubble sacks. I asked a small boy - he worked there, so it means I'm getting old, rather than that he was young - for rubble sacks. He misunderstood me and started trying to sell me some small rocks. I've got enough rubble. I don't need more. Eventually we sorted that misunderstanding out. I think the clue for him was when I said "they're like black bags, only heavy duty" - he eventually got it.

With the clearing up complete, I had a lot of rubble sacks sitting in my drive - they probably want to go to the tip - or at least they should consider going into the garage:


All neatly in sacks

I was a bit over the top with my brick-chucking around and one landed on my sweeping brush. The brush handle didn't like that. It was a metal handle and it kinked. Later, it snapped. I stopped work when my brush stopped working (that was Sunday).

Most of what's left is the tidy up operation and the removal of tiles in the ex-bathroom (soon to be the L of my kitchen). That's tonight's job. The builder starts in a couple of weeks and the electrician should have created the necessary wiring infrastructure by the close of play today.

It's moving at a pace.

I'm sort of the potential bottleneck.

Zoiks.

Labels: DIY

There's really only one way to describe what we did this weekend. It was a lot. Here are the snaps.

The Bedroom
The nasty wallpaper and dirty white frieze and ceiling were converted by paint into something smarter, not forgetting the white gloss over the magnolia gloss.

Repainting continued into the corner of the room to include the cupboard.


We had relocated the light to a central position before the photos were taken. The ceiling shows no clues of the holes now it's complete - note the grey in the "before" shot.

Some more of the room, now complete.


Upstairs Hall
Nasty faux wood effect on the wooden doors, finally vanquished.



Downstairs Hall
Faux wood effect door, now white. Two-tone staircase (faux wood and old varnish) now white. Faux wood plastic, now brighter. Brilliant. Brilliant white.




Staircase
Look at the difference some paint makes to a staircase. A surfaces you see in this photo (except the carpet) were painted. (Actually, some of the carpet was painted, but not on purpose.)



Top Of The Stairs
A view of the now covered-over wood:

And a smashing view of the landing with the gorgeously reconditioned window. Now white. White white white.

Labels: DIY

If I were a decorator then my first experience of putting up a sheet of wallpaper wouldn't have ended with it comically peeling itself off the wall from the top down, almost in slow motion. That was a laugh. No, really it was.

However, I repasted it and reattached it, and a whole bunch of other sheets - 6 in total - and now the bare plaster area of the walls in my hall looks like it has been inexpertly covered with lining paper, which appears to show all the flaws in the underlying walls AND any bits of grit or crap that managed to make their way under the paper in the process.

Do I sound impressed with my first "go" at papering? No? Well, I'm not. I'm also not too suprised, nor worried about it. I'll have a go at painting over this paper and see how it looks. I suspect that, once painted in matt emulsion, the flaws will be less apparent and the wall will look ok. It's not the end of the world. It was also a first attempt and I was using very little more than guesswork, hope, goodwill and something I remember reading on the net once.

I was also using a pasting table and some solvite.

I'll have another go in another room tonight and see what happens.

Last night I also did some painting. Gloss paint on a bay window frame and a room full of skirting board. Theoretically, I'm moving ever closer to finishing that room. Jings.

Part of the last two nights' DIY marathons (over 4 hours each night - in fact last night was 6) is to bring up my stamina levels for the planned weekend of decorating in Newcastle. Plus, it is useful to know how long certain jobs can take. Overall, no DIY job can take as long as it takes to clean the sodding paintbrush after gloss paint.

Yuck.

Labels: DIY

That's the new, more accurate, description of DIY. DSWSFS. In the case of doing something with noone for myself, then it's equivalent to DIY. On the other hand, doing something with Ol for Ol (yes, Ol, you got a mention), still counts as DSWSFS. It's also DIFSE (doing it for someone else).

The point is that, for the last 3 days, I've done something involving a house. I think that in all cases, the work has been carried out with enthusiasm and according to the best emergent plan. I'm pleased with the work. I'm also slightly chuffed that my shower-installing-type-man complimented me on my skirting boards, even though we both know they're a DIY job (especially in the corner where they go up by an inch in only 20 inches or so).

Anyway, compliments aside, I'd like to catalogue what's been achieved in the last few days. I'll work backwards. I think that a facet of the work done recently has been the development of a suitable ad hoc plan and then the completion of tasks within that plan. In other words, you review where things really are, you determine a discrete task that will get you a step forward in the right direction, choosing something at the top of the priority list (as well as the most possible thing) and then you bloody get on with it.

Home Improvement
Last night I planned to spend about two hours sanding some woodwork in the living room. I did neither two hours' work, nor did I do any sanding. That's the beauty of adaptive planning. When I returned home, I realised that the room I was going to turn into a vault of dust, contained a bunch of my builder's stuff, that he probably wouldn't want to be so dusty, and which I didn't want to either move or crawl around. I decided to jack it in for the night.

Then I decided not to jack it in. I want to get stuff done. Start some inertia and the inertia will build. So, I looked at tasks I could do. Two stood out. There was an electrical cable, which had been surface mounted, which my electrician had submerged into a cavity in the wall. I believe the term is chasing. It has been chased into the wall. However, the cavity hadn't been replastered. So I had a section of plaster patching I could do in order to get this wire fully out of site and wall-paper-over-able. The other major task was the fully sanded room. The woodwork in that room, including skirting board and wooden window-surround (not window-frame - the windows are metal double-glazing units), all needs painting.

So, not two hours of sanding. Four hours of painting instead (with a side order of some plaster-patching. I had to wire in a replacement light-switch too, and work by the light of a plug-in lamp, when I was plastering, so as to avoid using wet plaster around live wires. Just a precaution - everything was insulated.

"Everything was insulated"
That's possibly the best description of the weekend's work in Leeds. The sheer enormity of the Leeds project is such that, if you view it incorrectly, you may as well conclude that you could do nothing and achieve the same as doing something. The house needs so much work doing to it, that even a day's work is a mere drop in the ocean. From afar, the result of a day's work is so small that you could easily say that the distant view is identical, whether you do the work or not. Alternatively, you could stand in the place, with so many possible jobs to do, that just to review the to-do list will exhaust you and crush your spirit, thus making it impossible to start any one thing.

The point of going along to join in the work was two-fold. Firstly, working in a pair with a good friend is always good fun. It has the benefit of providing a worthwhile activity, while simultaneously making room for conversation and general amusement. Plus, working as a team is always a rewarding activity and can cause both parties to spur each other on to work harder and get the job done. Though I seem to find reserves of motivation sometimes when working alone, it's the hardest thing to do, when there's nobody to notice if you slack off. Working with someone else, who can spot if you're not pulling your weight, and who will be impressed if you give a good push and get the job done well/rapidly/beautifully... well, it's instant joy and motivation.

Second-fold, there was the aim to get the Leeds project back underway. Inertia builds. Breaking through the inertia and building some momentum was intended to be a gift to my Leeds friend. I think we achieved that. Well.

On the first morning, we had about an hour, once we'd got to the house after breakfast. Very poor planning. We had a two hour lunchbreak planned (so we were like professional builders). What can you do in an hour? Well, we found a job that could be done in an hour. So we do it. It involved a lintel. The roof was propped up with props, rather than a lintel. When we were finished, the props came down, but the roof didn't. Mentalismio.

Then that long lunch-break.

Then we returned and did various things relating to insulation. There was some plaster boarding first, then it was time to put up roof insulation. We started, devised techniques for doing it well and started to get some momentum up. We called it a night at about the point in time when we ran out of materials and still had time to buy some from the DIY shop when it closed.

The DIY shop was staffed by a nasty chav girl, who yattered into her phone while walking down the aisle with me to find a price for some drywall screws. Yuck.

An evening meal out, in which I renamed the waiting staff, and then there was sleeping, ready for a morning start.

We retrospectively earned the greasy-spoon-style sandwiches we bought at a different DIY shop, along with some other materials, by completing the roof insulation challenge. We devised special techniques for fitting the insulation into gaps and between roof joists. It was fun. We ended up with a job that took slightly longer than planned, but which we could be proud of.

And that's what it's all about.

Apart from the overrunning (though I'd technically used planned slack-time to make the overrunning ok).

Labouring
It has been an enjoyable few days with the labouring. There's something relaxing about doing physical labour. That's good because there's a lot of it needs doing in the next few months, and I'm probably going to be stressed and tired for a lot of it... so hopefully it will make me relaxed and non-tired.

The key to it is the bit where you earn the chance to step back and look at what you just made and go "yeah - that's good and I made it".

Labels: DIY

There are two floors in my house which are presently undergoing works. There's me in the downstairs, trying to bring two rooms to a decorated state. Then there's the shower room upstairs, which I have already wrecked to the point of being bare brick walls, and which I'm employing someone to turn into a real room with appropriate fittings, cubicles etc.

Yesterday I returned home, after giving a lift to a work colleague, whom I may give lifts to quite a lot from now on, given that he lives round the corner from me and would otherwise have to take two hours' worth of public transport to get home. Public transport sucks. I returned home with trepidation. I was expecting to see the skeleton of the new shower cubicle, maybe even some boxed pipework or something. What I discovered was amusing. There were three pieces of new wood in the bathroom. In fairness, they were beautifully cut and attached. I looked around, trying to see what else had been done. There was also a hole cut for the extractor fan, and another for the drain from the shower. Oh, and there were four holes in the ceiling for the lights. I was still amused, though.

I think that the builder has been called away from working on my house by other jobs. Surely that's the explanation. He does have a problem at a nearby property he runs, so he must have been called away.

Still the work he's done so far is of a good quality, and he seems to have some nice tools, so he must know what he's doing. I'm not paying him by the hour, so it shouldn't matter to me how he does it. Perhaps he's a person who plans and plan and then, in a fit of herculean effort, suddenly makes it all happen in one single day's spurt of activity.

I don't know.

I had a bit of a slow night last night myself. I wanted to replicate my efforts of the night before where I got a whole room sanded and filled, ready for painting and papering. I couldn't do it. There were a few reasons. The fact that the shower room guy had used the living room as his place for keeping his lengths of wood for the shower cubicle hampered me a little. This room was also full of all of my tools, in a random jumble too. So, I did the only sensible thing. I sorted out my tools and swept the room out first. Then I did some sanding. There's probably another 4 hours' work to do in that room to get it up to standard. However, I'm not sure whether I want to make the shelves and boxing inside the alcove cupboard in the room before I commit any paint to it. If I'm going to make the shelves, then I may as well do it before properly dusting the room out, because it will make a load of dust. The shelves can then be painted with the rest of the woodwork. It seems like the right thing to do.

Maybe on Monday I'll do the sanding and some filling. Then perhaps on Tuesday I can set about making the inside of this alcove cupboard. I should probably even do some of my patented amateur plastering in there. Actually, I'm not sure one can patent being shit.

This weekend, I'm off up north to help someone else in their house. I'll hopefully be motivated more when I return. Or totally knackered.

Labels: DIY

I don't know exactly what I thought I'd be doing in the house when I got home last night. I mean, I don't know what my exact plan was before the point when I started. I know what I'd prepared for. I'd prepared to do some sanding and I'd bought some flexible filler, which I assume I was planning to use. I have two rooms in the downstairs of my house which required the attention of the sander, both having been reskirting-boarded this weekend past. Both rooms need painting, lining papering, and painting some more.

I knew that I wasn't planning to do any painting.

I think I was planning to sand everything and do some filling. I don't know. I don't think I was expecting to complete anything.

The two rooms in question are the living room and what will be a downstairs bedroom in the rented version of this house. The living room also contains a bunch of tools at the moment. The other big room only really had a radiator in it, a few offcuts of skirting board, and the tools I'd been using to sand things or attach skirting boards. I realised, as I was about to get started, that I should try to turn the overall process of making these room less undecorated, into a series of steps. I also realised that I could get a greater sense of success if I focused my efforts on one of the rooms and tried to progress that one room towards decoration.

In the long road to success, steps included - 1. Sand everything, 2. Apply the flexible filler. The "sand everything" step, included using coarse-grade sandpaper on recently filled screw holes, then using medium and fine grade on everything else. I have an orbital sander (I had two, but the older one finally broke apart under the strain of use), which I could use for flat surfaces, and I have my hands for the sculpted bits of architrave and skirting board. I also wanted to do some light sanding to the walls as a way of scrubbing off any detritus that was left after wallpaper stripping - this isn't necessarily the right way to do things, but I reckoned it had a fair old chance of success.

At just after 6pm I started work in the non-living room. I focused on task after task, with the radio playing and my energy levels staying reasonably high. I sanded, I scrubbed, I swept, I sanded some more, I swept some more and the time went by. I only heard James Blunt once on the local radio station, and that wasn't even during the DIY-athon. A couple of hours in, all the sanding was pretty much done in that room. I hadn't used the flexible filler yet, so I decided to do that too. I did the flexible filling, and a reasonable job I made of it, if I do say so myself.

So, by the end of the session, I had managed to get one room from where it was into a condition where I could, theoretically, start decorating it. I think I may still want to look at whether the walls need some further scrubbing before lining paper goes on them. I also need to deal with the quantity of dust that is probably still adherent to the wood in the room. I hate getting dust into the paint. I also hate paintbrush hairs in my paintwork.

Tonight, I get the choice of either doing the same trick in the living room, or putting some paint on in the room I did last night. I think the first thing I need to do is sort out the tools that are cluttering up the living room. If I can get control over my workspace, then perhaps I'll be a lot more effective. If I can do another 4 hour DIY session in the house tonight, then I will have really pushed myself this week, and that will be good.

This weekend I'm off up North, so there'll be no progress in the house without me. Unless you count the fact that the shower room is presently being worked on by the builder, which means that I'll get something nice to look at tonight, and also means that, when I return to the house on Sunday night, there will appear to have been progress over the weekend (even though it will have happened while I'm out at work tomorrow).

Given the amount of footfall through the living room, it may make sense not to decorate it as early as this month. The other downstairs room might tolerate being decorated this early on. Perhaps next week. The advantage of decorating the room will be that it brushes up on my painting skills (yuk yuk) and also gives me a chance to learn wallpapering in anticipation of Easter Weekend, where I'll be up in Newcastle redecorating a room which needs re-wallpapering. So I need to learn the skills sometime soon.

This weekend, up North, I don't know exactly what manner of house-maintenance I'll be helping with, but I expect to learn or at least perfect some skill or other in the process.

Then I can retire from computers and become a joiner.

Or painter.

Or comedian.

Or probably not retire from computers, and just stay a dabbler.

Labels: DIY

Last night I laboured in the house for a couple of hours. I think that two or so hours is about the right amount of time to dedicate to general-purpose DIY in a given evening. If there is a specific task that takes longer, then it can be laboured at indefinitely. However, if I'm doing a series of bitty tasks, then two hours is a reasonable attention span. As a result of yesterday's labourings, I achieved the following:

• Bagging the remainder of the rubble from the bathroom (some of which I chipped away from the walls freshly)
• Raising some floorboards to expose pipes and cabling - accidentally exposing some rotten floorboards that will have to be replaced
• Installing the hall light for the downstairs hall ceiling
• Applying plaster-patching to the remaining holes in the downstairs rooms, and repatching some bits that I'd not managed to patch properly the last time
• Having a general-purpose sweep up around the place

Not bad for a couple of hours. Most notably, though, I made another schoolboy error. I failed to check how complicated the wiring was for the downstairs hall light. I assumed it would be another 12 wire job, in need of a junction box. It proved to be drastically simpler than that - 3 wires. No need to raise floorboards at all. However, the upshot of raising all of those floorboards was that I discovered some rot. I have sections of floor that need rebuilding anyway in the bathroom, and it won't harm the work of the heating people if there are some boards already up when they arrive.

There's not going to be an awfully large amount of time available for house things before the heating people come. Then, in the following week - their first week in the house - there's probably not going to be a great deal of time either. As a result of this, I need to focus on making the place as habitable as possible, in the occasional times I get to dabble with DIY in it, as I have my family coming round to have a look in a couple of weekends' time. Though they won't judge me badly if it's a mess (given that it's not going to be down to bad housekeeping), it would be nice if the place were at least slightly habitable, so we're not forced to keep our coats on and then adjourn elsewhere to spend time together. We'll see. It will go at its own pace.

I must, in fact, empty my car of crap and go to B&Q and buy my bathroom fittings. I know what I want. That's quite an important task to do. I don't know where I'm going to store the fittings, though. I have a few ideas. In fact, I even have a shopping list I wrote when I was writing a verbose letter to the person who's doing the work.

Labels: DIY

DIY fans, this is a post for you. Non DIY fans, you may aswell skip it.

I'll admit now that I had a lazier Sunday than planned. This was probably for the best, since I slaved away for much of Friday night and Saturday. I had a list of things to achieve for the weekend. I achieved much of them, I missed one thing off, but did a bunch others. It's been quite good fun.

On the way home from work on Friday, I stopped at a B&Q, bought some wood - one piece of MDF for making cupboard doors with, and one piece of knackered chipboardy worktoppy stuff from the offcuts department, which I was going to make into a plinth for my TV - it's a temporary plinth, so the wood wasn't worth much to me. I paid 50p for my plinth wood. Result. The MDF was cheap as it too was an offcut. I also bought a workbench. This was B&Q's own workbench and it cost under £10. The aim of a workbench for me is to have something a bit like a vice and of a height suitable for sawing on.

I used to have a theory that, in time, everything vaguely furniture like, left in my garage, would eventually become a sawhorse. This was probably a truth, but now I have a workbench I need not worry about it happening in my new place.

I arrived home via the Subway shop and proceeded to assemble my workbench. Then I went on a frenzy which involved using the most dangerous tools I possess in close succession. Tool one, on the most dangerous list, is the circular saw. I cut my pieces for my plinth. I also screwed up a bit, managing to fail to account for the accuracy of my measurment and also the width of my saw blade. So my plinth was bound to be wonky. Bear in mind that this is a temporary bit of furniture (which means I'll live with it for years, meaning not to!). I also managed to drop it after screwing it together, which make it a bit wonkier. However, once it was screwed into place, it was pretty solid and I didn't mind putting my TV on it. My second tool of the dangerous variety was the angle grinder, which I applied to my cast iron bath, thus cutting it in twain.

With my ears ringing from the angle grinding, my head burning from the sparks, soot in my eyes and joy in my heart, I headed to Tesco to buy some pencils, a ruler and a TV aerial to go with my TV. The plan was to get an amplified indoor aerial and try to get my freeview box working.

At Tesco, I bought some mechanical pencils and a two-piece ruler. The two-piece ruler was a few pence, so I wasn't going to argue - it may be useful, it may not. It doesn't matter. Ultimately, I'll buy a long metal one for DIY (though I later found that a metal carpet strip is as effective). I commented to the assistant, working nearby in the stationery department, that I'd never seen a two-piece ruler before. The ruler is hinged. I guess that this allows you to store it in the space of a 6 inch ruler, even though it's a 12 inch one. The woman, who spoke with an Eastern European accent and was quite grandmotherly in appearance, smiled with an infectious joy and tried to sell me this 63p ruler. She explained that it was great that it was two pieces because you could use it to measure small things and also big ones. What a lovely explanation. I wonder what she'd do with a tape measure.

At the till, my head still ringing from the angle grinder, and my face (unbeknown to me) covered in soot, I spotted a couple of lads in front of me. They were buying various items, including a box of CD-Rs. I remarked thus:

"CD-R eh? I've got a few of their albums. Very quiet."

Not a brilliant joke. The younger one worked it out and didn't laugh. The older one was deeply confused. Really put off. Very phased. In the end his brother explained it to him. He was still freaked out by it. Apparently he'd just come off a plane from Tenerife. My CD-R joke... what a pointless waste of air.

A grabbed a shower and then headed back home for some shut-eye (bear in mind that I shower at my old place of residence, not yet owning a working shower).

Saturday morning, I woke early enough to be awake when my garbage collection expert called round to give me a quote, but not early enough to be out of my dressing gown when this happened. Essentially, I've got a couple of skips' worth of crap in my garage and I want shut of it. I reckoned that paying some man to tip it might be cheaper than skips. He reckons that he can charge 75% of a skip-hire-charge. I reckon that I'll not bother. I may as well hire a van and drive the stuff to the tip myself, or, at the price he was charging, buy an old Ford Mondeo, drive the stuff to the tip, and then leave the Mondeo there for scrap when I'm done.

I did many things on Saturday. I made my MDF into doors for a cupboard. This took more attempts than I'm proud of. However, the doors look okay on the cupboard. They'd have looked better if the cupboard had been square to start with. Running out of things to do from my list, I went back out to B&Q and bought more things to fit in the house. In this case, I bought a bunch of lights for my three halls (one on each floor) and some energy saving lightbulbs.

The top hall was in the most need of a light, its dangling lightbulb holder no longer capable of supporting a light. I started work on the wiring in of a new light. I turned off the power to the house first (once bitten, twice shy) and worked by the light of the fading sun, the emergency lighting (handing for this sort of thing) and a mini torch in my mouth. The old light fitting had been able to support the myriad wires coming in from the ceiling. The new light fitting was intended to connect into a couple of wires most. You couldn't use it as a ceiling-based junction box. This complicated matters for me. To cut a long story down a little, I ended up doing wiring with my head in the loft and one arm also in there helping. The torch, held between my lips, was particularly useful. It wasn't especially comfortable.

I got my light working and I was pleased with it. However, I felt the need to use a proper junction box for future lights. I also felt it was a lot of effort to do even one.

Saturday night included time spent watching Police Squad on DVD.

Sunday morning was a late wake-up, followed by a slow start to the day. Eventually I decided to go back to Tesco to get breakfast and to return the piece-of-crap indoor aerial which had proved not to work at all when I tried it on Friday night. No complaints at the returns desk:

"Is it faulty?"
"No, it's just not very good."

Having visited B&Q on Friday after work and on Saturday afternoon, I decided to break with tradition and visit Homebase. There I bought various electrical things. I bought new light switches - many of the switches in the house are old and nasty-looking. For £2 they can be replaced with nice new onces. Easy. I also bought some wire and junction boxes - those other lights wouldn't beat me.

Back at the house, I set about doing the electrical work I'd set out to do. This was interrupted by a visitor who had come especially to help me move the last two pieces of the bath out of the house to join the increasingly voluminous (and expensive to dispose of) collection of rubbish in my garage. That was sorted in a few seconds, and was followed by a tour of the in-progress house.

Then back to the electrics. Many switches were replaced (not that many, but I figured them all out) and the second floor hall light was installed, which involved me taking up floorboards on the top floor and re-routing wires so that I could get everything to meet up at my junction box in an accessible bit of space in the floor.

All my electrics worked first time, even the two-way switches.

Then I set about finishing the cupboard I was working on. The cupboard was a four-door affair, the top two doors of which were missing. I had replaced the doors yesterday and attached magnetic catches to the new doors, which are hinged with piano hinges. As a result of my incompetence, my first attempt had resulted in a between-door gap of 15mm, which was way too much. I fixed the problem on Saturday by cutting a larger door, larger by just under 15mm, funnily enough. This solved the problem perfectly. The doors didn't hang square, but there was no way I could have solved this problem, outside of making non-rectangular doors, and that wasn't going to happen. I'd bought knobs for all of the doors, and I wanted to convert the lower-two doors, which were supposed to close with some sort of metal catch, into magnetic-catch doors too.

I removed the redunant door-furniture and then tried to screw the magnets into the frame of this cupboard. It took a lot of effort and th destruction of many of the screws provided before I went downstairs to my collection of screws (which I'd sorted through and put into a special container on Saturday) and brought up 4 that did the job perfectly without causing me to strain anything further.

But the door magnets need a magnetic strip on the door to catch on, and the placement of these strips needs to be quite precise. My solution: I got into the cupboard with a torch in my mouth and a pencil in my hand. Closing the door on the magnetic strip, attached to the magnet, I was then able to draw around it.

I wonder whether any of the neighbours saw me doing this.

"Ooh, look at the new guy. He just got into his cupboard. Where's he think he's going? Narnia? Mind you, he does emergy from his house all sooty from time to time. What a weirdo."

I'd like them to think I'm a weirdo. Maybe they'll fear me and stop parking in front of my drive.

I stopped work at about 5 on Sunday, the plan being to get a shower and go out for the night. I succeeded in this plan. I went to see some comedy, then I came home, then I wrote this (and the previous blog) over the course of an hour while my bedroom warmed up... then I stopped...

Labels: DIY

I set off home tonight with a mission. I was going to remove the toilet and then the tiles behind it. This toilet had given me some sort of rushing of water last time I flushed it and so I had decided to take it out (I think I did the joke on that already). To take out a toilet involves both capping the pipe feeding its cistern and also removing a cistern that is full of water and cannot be flushed without mimicking niagara falls.

Fun.

Last time I turned off the mains water, the neighbours were shocked. Today I went to them all and warned them. I promised no more than 30 minutes' outage. I already had the compression fitting cap end to stick on the end of the pipe. What could go wrong? Well, I wasn't feeling too cocky.

I turned off the water, cut the pipe high up and drained it into a bucket. A little seepage onto the floor, but largely successful. Then I cut it where I was going to cap it, capped it, and then went downstairs to try putting the water back on. Essentially, I was turning a tap which would allow a bunch of water back into my pipes. These pipes also contain some air and there is no tap to let this air out through (since the pipe is now totally capped). In one single turn of the mains stop tap outside, I was allowing a water pressure, possibly pushing against an air cushion, to build behind my two capped ends (one from today and one from Saturday). This, to me, seemed like something which could cause a cap to decide to come off.

I ran upstairs to look for signs of problems. The sign would be something like sweating, dripping or gushing. There was nothing. I'd done it. 5 minutes and job done.

Wow.

I still had a cistern full of water and a toilet which apparently wasn't connected properly to the soil pipe. I also had some water in the bottom of the toilet.

It was time to try to drain the cistern. I had three buckets on standby. I also found that the cistern pipe didn't seem to be fully connected to the toilet. In fact it was loose. Perhaps it was the cistern pipe that was gushing the other day, rather than the waste. Overall, I think that would have been the best thing to happen, since the waste would contain, well, waste.

I held the open end of the cistern pipe over my bucket and flushed. The water came. The bucket filled. I swapped buckets. There was some spillage. The water stopped lng before the second bucket filled.

This was great.

I set about removing the cistern from the wall - it was tough, but I managed it without slopping the water, left in the bottom of it, anywhere it shouldn't have gone. I pried the toilet off the floor and emptied its remaining water into a bucket.

Essentially, I didn't mess this up. I now have no bathroom fittings at all fitted in my bathroom and today I sent a cheque, along with detailed instructions, to the guy who's going to fit new stuff. All I have to do is clear some rubble sacks, do a few more passes at sweeping the room out and cut the cast-iron bath up some more, so I can remove that. Sounds pretty doable.

Labels: DIY

It's the 7th of the month and I feel broke. There's like £50 in my current account, and I'm not due to be paid again for weeks. At least this is the shortest month and it's not a leap-year. Ok, so technically I keep very little money in my current account anyway, transferring it all to my savings account to maximise interest, but that's not the point. I'm shelling out money left right and centre and that's got to hurt. I know I've got the money sitting in an account for this exact purpose, but that's not the point. Though there's plenty of money at the moment, there's also plenty of work to do. As a result I've written some budgets which pretty much convince me that I'll either have just enough, not quite enough, or plenty less. They're not very accurate budgets.

On the money front, there's news that pay conditions at work are changing so that we're not getting bonuses anymore. Instead, we're getting what we might have gotten as a bonus added to our salary. So it will seem like there's a rise in my pay in the next pay check or so - some of this may even be backdated (perhaps enough to pay for my new computer and TV). You'd think I'd be happy, but I guess I'm aware that, had things been different, I would have worked for and earned exactly the same bonus. So, I would probably have exactly the same amount of wealth by this point. The only advantage of it happening like this is to avoid the "bonus effect" that a friend of mine talks about - where a bonus is spent several times over because you imagine you have more money than you do. In this case, the bonus happens to pay for things I bought because I suddenly found myself having to buy them. Maybe the net result is the same, but with different expectations. Maybe I'm actually doing the bonus effect with the X-amount of money, presently sitting in my savings account, which is allocated for developing the house. I keep imagining that it will cover ALL the jobs that need doing, when it wouldn't take too many of them to go wrong before I'm in trouble.

Pay rises will happen at some point. It's possible that mine will happen in 2008. As a result, I may feel like I'm not getting any more money, especially coupled with the rise in my living costs, as a result of living alone in a house that I'm progressively destroying and making less tenantable.

It's not really money that bothers me. Being able to do something is far more important. Actually doing things is even more important. If I fail to get the house sorted in time, then it will cost me even more than planned/reasonable. It has to succeed. I'm basically putting two hours in per night. It's hard to find the energy to do too much labouring, and not all jobs can be completed in one sitting.

I'm having a bad day. Things don't seem so rosy today.

Last night I did some plaster patching. The stuff I used may or may not be good enough for the job. It went on ok, but will need sanding to flat. All surfaces will be wallpapered over, so flatness is all I need - it doesn't need to hide cracks especially well, or be perfectly smooth. Last night I also did some wrecking in the bathroom. I'm still wary of rupturing my cistern. So, I was careful. It was some hard tile-chipping. At one point stuff was falling off the walls and taking my collection of tools off the windowsill of the bathroom. I was worried about losing them in the rubble.

When I'd tidied up the job, I thought I'd made a reasonable fist of it. (I think that's a phrase people use.)

I'm an idiot. Did I mention that?

I discovered that something had gone awfully wrong when I flushed the toilet late in the night. I don't know exactly what is wrong, but I do know that the connection between the back of the toilet and the pipe outside is not water-tight. I know this because a quantity of water (and god knows what else) escaped into the room at quite high velocity. I managed to leap out of the way, grab a mop and deal with this water before it did too much damage. What the hell's wrong is not something I even want to know. I do know that I'm going to disconnect and remove the toilet very very soon.

I went to sleep grumpy as a result. I woke up grumpy too.

This lunchtime, I organised the builder to do the bathroom. He can worry about making the toilet not spew water everywhere when it's flushed... it will even be a different toilet. I suppose I ought to go out and buy the toilet I'm expecting him to use.

I hadn't just had a poo in it when I flushed it.

I couldn't wake up this morning. When I eventually did, I ended up in an hour of traffic to work, which got me there late. Annoying.

This lunchtime, feeling a bit moody, I decided to break my resolve to eat healthily - I found out last night that a brief spurt of weightloss has been reversed (not in the extreme, but enough to annoy me) - and went across the road to get Fish and Chips and mushy peas, with brown sauce. The bastards didn't even have any. I couldn't even eat unhealthily. I ended up with the vaguely healthy lunch I usually have from the cafe of this office building.

Buying a DVD at lunchtime didn't help alleviate my grumpiness.

On the plus side, one of my blisters is healing nicely.

Also on the plus side, though I'm grumpy and annoyed in my head, I'm not raging with pain/annoyance physically. Sometimes you can get so fussed that you feel physically buzzing with it. I'm physically quite calm - probably exhaustion.

I don't know exactly what I'm going to do tonight, but I would like to do something which feels useful. It may involve removing a faulty toilet (I have a downstairs loo too, which was pretty grim, but is now the best loo in the house).

I've dealt with worse things than today.

Labels: DIY, money, plumbing, stress

There's a lot of dust in my life at the moment. I'm not speaking metaphorically. I mean literally. Here's a fact: when you remove tiles or wallpaper, you can either weaken, or expose the existing weaknesses of the plaster behind. If you remove the plaster behind, and I recommend a mask for this job, you get a lot of dust. If you intend to put patches of plaster back in some of the holes, then you need to avoid the dust, since plaster doesn't bond well to dust.

With these things buzzing round my head, I took an odd route home after work last night. I went via B&Q. I'd chickened out of buying some PVA during one of my THREE trips to B&Q on the weekend, thinking that the plaster I'd bought would magically bond, but the thought of the plaster dropping immediately back out of the holes I was slopping it into was playing on my mind. So, off to B&Q. Anyway, I also wanted to check out skirting boards and electric mitre saws. I spent a few good minutes with each of these tasks and even bought some more grinding wheels for my angle grinder.

I needed to make a solution of 1 part PVA to 5 parts water. I also needed to stir my PVA. As I passed the Morrisons the answer hit me. I'd buy a cheapo measuring jug and some spoons. This is a cooking answer to a DIY problem. Excellent. As I was at the till with my slightly not-cheapo jug and my very cheapo spoons, I happened to discuss with the till assistant what the jug was to be used for. She was impressed. I explained that it was a man solution. "Man use jug in garage to mix paint" sort of thing. She admitted that she'd once used a knife for a screwdriver. I said that that was a very woman solution. I asked what she'd used for a hammer? A spoon? Or maybe made some pliers from two forks. I left her with the advice to use an insulated handled knife - maybe a wooden handle - for electrical screwdrivering.

Oh, how smart and clever did I feel after riffing on the subject of cutlery as tools. Oh what a smarty pants. Oh Mr Comedian, you are so intelligent, making your mockery in Morrisons. My bubble burst quite quickly as I had to spent about 6 minutes searching for my car. In my hurry to get into the shop, I'd totally failed to make any attempt to memorise where I'd parked. What a knobhead!

Back home, I made my PVA mix, mixing it like a chef might mix a custard. Then, having brushed the debris from all my plaster holes, I painted in the PVA. The holes should now be sound. This took much less time than, say, finding my car might have taken if Morrisons were a bigger store. With nothing else to tackle downstairs for the time being, I set about working on my bathroom again.

I took the radiator off in the bathroom, expecting at least some vagrant liquid to seep out of it. Of all the radiators I've removed, this is the one with the least risk. The radiator itself is headed for the dustbin. The pipes are due to be moved/replaced. The flooring is both waterproof and also headed for the dustbin. This is the radiator where it doesn't matter if it all goes wrong. It was totally empty of liquid and came off with no problems at all. Arse!

I'd already removed all the tiles and plaster from two walls of the bathroom. The walls remaining are the one with the window (partly de-tiled) and the wall at a right angle to it on the right hand side. Between the two walls, at 45% to where you'd imagine it should be pointed, is the toilet. The toilet's cistern is supported on two metal arms at eye level. I started work removing tiles on this wall. I was wary of going too close to the cistern. The way I saw this going wrong was that I'd remove some innocent looking tile and then there'd be the tile equivalent of a landslide, which would result in the cistern, full of water, falling off the wall, drenching everything and blocking my exit from the room. Then the pipe, feeding this cistern, would start gushing mains pressure water at me. There'd be no way out of the room, unless I dug through the now sodden and muddy plaster, and then the only way to get the water to stop gushing, once I'd tramped muddy footprints across what's left of my carpet, would be to cut off the water supply to the whole street again.

This was the scenario I imagined. So I was careful. And I avoided it. And I think that the arms holding the cistern are probably embedded deeply in the brickwork, but I'm not sure. I will have the toilet cut off in a couple of weeks and then remove it.

I filled four rubble sacks with... well... rubble. Then I called it a night. I'd done about 2 hours of labouring. My arms really ache. It's a bad combination of general RSI and the straining of muscles I never used to use until a hammer became my new friend.

It was around 8.30pm when I went to get a Subway sandwich. Having eaten this in the shop I returned home to warm up with my electric heater, which felt very ineffective, and watch the remainder of Catterick, Vic and Bob's 2004 comedic drama. I was immediately distracted from this by a couple of MSN sessions and an email I'd received, containing some comedy script work from another comedian. I read this a couple of times and gave a detailed dissection/assassination of it. I hope that this was useful to its author.

Eventually, the computer went off and Catterick went back on. It was a curious series which sort of worked and sort of didn't. Bob Mortimer's straight acting isn't really what it should be, and some of the scenes didn't quite work. Matt Lucas played three characters, one of whom's accent seemed to slip in and out of the cod-Indian he was aiming for. However, it was a nicely surreal piece with some excellent supporting performances from Morwenna Banks (I always liked her and now I like her more) and Tim Healy (by far the funniest delivery). Vic Reeves was, as always, on excellent character-acting form. I'd missed this series when it was first on - I was probably too busy with The Musical! or something. It was good to finally catch up.

Oh, and the title of this post, is a quote from Matt Lucas in Little Britain, which sort of wraps together the whole thing. I was trying to seal dust in, I generated some dust, and then I watched the king of dust in a DVD.

Dust.

Labels: comedy, DIY, DVD

My back aches from the straining I did with that cast-iron bath. My hand aches from the combination of exertion and having been hit with a hammer. My headache has gone.

In yesterday's post, I didn't mention Friday night's gig, which had me aching from laughing. I'm assuming, though, that the nerves which sometimes give me a tight lower back, and the laughing, which can sometimes hurt my sides, have not been responsible for my discomfort this morning. Anyway, back to the story of the gig.

It was quite a cramped bill on Friday. This was my fault. I'd asked the organisers of the gig for an open spot, just so I could have a "live rehearsal" of my material in front of an audience. I have been very worried about my time away from the stage and I want as many gigs as possible in order to loosen myself back up. I think that I'll have to call an end to this worrying in the middle of the month, since it's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I say to myself, I'm a bit tight and out of practice, so it won't go so well, and then I go out and give a twisted-tight performance which doesn't go so well. Not the best combination.

Anyway, I was due to go on second in the first section, following Sean Meo, one of the nation's chief comic performer/writers. I was waiting outside the room as he performed, so I didn't hear a word of his set, at least not clearly. I quipped to my fellow comedians, as we stood in the hall - "That's the thing about these professional comedians: they're so muffled". I went on and did 15 minutes - it had a bit of a lull in it, and a few moments where I was expecting a laugh or at least a bigger reaction, and foundered a bit as I recovered my flow. However, it was a gig that it took me less then 10 minutes to drive home from, and I got enough laughs to justify going on stage, so I'm pleased I did it.

I'm also pleased that I stayed around for the other acts. Nick Page was very good in the middle section as was newer act, Wendy Wason. Headliner, Rob Deering, was everything I wanted him to be, and more. I remember seeing Rob in 2002's Fringe and putting him on my list of must-see comedians. I've seen a couple of his Fringe shows since then and I've been on the bill with him a couple of times. It's always slightly embarrassing that his guitar playing simply urinates on mine from a great big height, but he's such a pleasant guy, and so funny with it, that I can't feel jealous, nor does he act like I'm inferior (even though we both know it).

I've seen a lot of Rob's material before, but hearing it again raised big laughs from me, and some of his newer stuff was similarly crippling. I honked and hooted through the 40 minutes or so he was on stage. It was excellent. I've missed stand-up.

So, there was laughing until it hurt, self-injury with DIY, what else could I do to myself this weekend to cause pain? Repetitive strain injury, perhaps?

Well, the jury is still out. I have so many pains in my hands, back and wrists, it's hard to say whether any were caused by the hours I spent at the keyboard this weekend. I should point out that I'm not in agony. I'm just hamming up my mild discomfort. Don't call an ambulance just yet. Whoah there.

I spent a while at the keyboard this weekend working on an article for Micro Mart. When I started writing it, I had no idea if it would hang together, or even meet the lower end of its word-count range. 1800-2400 words seems like a lot when your first word count comes in under 400. However, I used my usual technique of writing a skeleton outline of the piece and then filling in various sections once I knew what I wanted to say. As is often the case with my writing, I used a combination of anecdote and opinion, rather than vast quantities of hard technical data. It is a piece on the use of computers and the internet for cheating and I used the internet quite heavily to research it. Perhaps this is perverse? Perhaps not. I made sure that I had hard facts and sources for many of the things I asserted, which probably made it one of my better pieces. A lot less vague.

The writing had been started on my old laptop the week before last, but the new laptop proved very good at allowing me to pick up where I left off. I did a couple of hours of writing on Saturday night in front of the TV without even having to plug the machine in. Yes! A battery that works! I finished the piece off last night. I'd finished the overall draft on Saturday night, but needed to review it a couple of times to try to shave it down and to make sure it made sense. It had been written piecemeal, and the pieces needed to fit together. Each section needed a start and end, and the conclusion needed to be solid. I wasn't certain if it fit.

Despite my worries that I'd not make 1800 words, the finished piece came in at 3000 words! I had to offer the editor the opportunity to ask me to cut it further, or invoice him for a shorter piece. He seemed happy with the draft I sent him, though. Phew.

To get the finished article (pardon the pun), I used a technique that I seldom use. It works well. I speed read the piece out loud. I suppose that living alone helped me with this. While reading it out loud, I was quickly aware of difficult sentences or missed words. I hope the printed piece looks as fluent as it felt on my screen last night.

How to end the weekend? I ended it as it began. I watched some musical comedy. In this case, it was Bill Bailey's Cosmic Jam DVD. A DVD I've agonised over buying for the last year. It was alright. Bill's definitely improved a hell of a lot since 1995, when it was recorded, and the recording had a number of technical problems which probably prevented them originally releasing it. Only die-hard fans would put up with occasional camera goofs and some awful sound problems. I'm a die-hard fan.

Labels: comedy, DIY, writing

No, not another Beatles song title for a post title!? Yes, I fear so. Still, it is a pertinent title, so I'm keeping it. If I write a post called "Glass Onion" then I give you, my reader, whoever you are, the permission to exclaim something of your own choice very loudly.

Following work last night, I drove back to the house. I had time to get changed and then the heating engineer was due. We've already booked a date for the heating works, but it was pencilled in pending an on-site inspection and review of exactly what would be done and where it would be done. The guy was due at 6.30. So, at about that time, I was dressed in working clothes and ready for him. Rather than start a DIY job, I migrated my data to my new computer and installed some software on it. This proved relatively painless. A call from the engineer told me he was running late, so I did some more of the computer preparation.

Eventually, the guy arrived and we spent a good hour working out how the installation would be done. It requires me to contract my roofer to seal around the flue, and it also requires me to rip out the bathroom. I was going to do that anyway, but I now need it to be done a lot sooner. This is not the end of the world. It is, however, a non-trivial task. Specifically, I need to rip out the bath and make the area behind it, which we're keeping as a void, accessible. The bath is cast iron. The void is currently covered with the remains of a wood and plaster wall. Fun is to be had.

After the engineer had left, I drove around the corner to where a meal was waiting for me. I had the possibility of some help, but this help had decided that the best way to help me was not to join me back at the house in the tile-ripping-off, but, instead, stay at home ironing MY shirts. That's a pretty good deal.


I returned to the house, put on a breathing mask and started hacking tiles and plaster off. I'd removed my glasses to avoid them getting dusty and steamed up from the beathing mask. Ideally, I should have worn a pair of goggles, but I was generally working at arm's length, so it probably didn't matter. It didn't.

I hacked and scraped and the bath, a cast iron affair, a bath that I will curse when I have to take it out of the room and down the stairs, made an excellent job of catching most of the rubble falling from the wall. This has been its own job in the house since I bought it. This bath will never see hot water, heated and paid for by me. That's quite sad, really. Then, so is living in a house with increasingly fewer home-comforts. It's amazing how normal that now seems.

It got to a point where I could see dust blowing off my mask when I exhaled. I was tackling a larger area of wall than I had the previous night, and even the small bit of wall on the previous night had been enough to make me wheeze with the acrid dust that came out of the plaster. The face mask was clearly doing a cracking job, because I didn't lose the power to breathe, avoid choking, or live.

At some point, my frenzy of wrecking the walls came to an end as the bath was largely full of rubble and I reckoned it was too late to be making hacky-hacky-tap-tap noises in my bathroom. The bathroom is fairly isolated, being located between two internal walls and an external wall (rather than any party walls), but enough was enough. I set to bagging the spoils of my efforts. I filled five rubble sacks and the bath was still fairly full of rubble. I need some sort of shovel. My 67p dustpan, usually coopted into such situations as a shovel, was sadly broken by a falling tile. I'll buy another, then.

Dusty in a way I seldom get, I returned to the house around the corner for a shower and a viewing of Desperate Housewives, which is, basically, smashing. I know. I shouldn't watch it, but it's very good. Plus, when I get my Freeview box working, I'll be able to watch it at home. I still haven't gotten the Freeview hooked up. I need to erect a plinth for the TV to stand on, so the Freeview box won't be crushed by it. Low priority!

I returned home for some sleep.

Tonight and tomorrow night I have gigs. Tonight's is in Grantham, so I will be back late. Tomorrow's is local, so there may be a chance to do some bath clearage before I get some slumber. The weekend is going to be crucial, though. The bathroom needs clearing and I need to consider how much other stuff I want to be done before radiators come back into rooms and obscure sections of wall.

Labels: DIY

Not everything in life has a snooze button like my alarm clock. In some ways, it would be pretty cool if things did. Maybe you're driving on the motorway, the traffic's getting stressful and you're worried about getting to your destination on time. It would be great if there were a massive snooze button on your dashboard, that you could use to pause everything for 10 minutes (well, 9 minutes) just to get a break from it, before getting back to the rush. No? Just me on that one? Fair enough.

So, there's no stopping the inevitability of the costs and the urgency of the completion of the house work. That's the work on the house, rather than generic "housework". In fairness to me, I did do some vacuuming last night, but it was a bit like someone mopping the deck on the sinking Titanic. I also did some sweeping.

My aim for last night was to put the house in general order and then get on with some tile removal in the bathroom. I think I know how the bathroom is going to be done and I think that I'll have quite a few tasks to achieve myself in order to get it to completion. So, no time to hang around. I didn't really achieve that much last night, but the tidy round will prove its usefulness. I included my car and the putting out of the rubbish, which was collected this morning, which is handy. I even did some recycling - I'm so green!

As a result of last night's activities, my car now feels like a passenger vehicle again, and is less of the rubbish bin. I also have ease of movement round the second room I sort of live in. One of the walls - the smallest (about the width of a door and a half) - in the bathroom is now devoid of tiles (and I have the slight cut in the finger to prove that I was handling tiles). My nose and lungs are also filled with disgusting plaster dust, which will be a real problem to come, since I am, apparently, taking the walls back down to the brickwork in readiness for the man who comes and sorts out the big hole where the bathroom used to be.

Surprisingly, although I managed to take a backup of my old computer, I didn't get around to even unboxing my new computer last night. I was too tired. I went to sleep, perchance to dream.

I dreamt, apparently, that it was the weekend. Thus I was extremely surprised when the alarm went off. I snoozed it immediately, and wondered why I would have set it to go off when I had a weekend morning in which to lie in. Then my mobile phone alarm went off. I was cross with this too, since it's programmed to go off on weekday mornings only. Why would it malfunction in this way and go off on a weekend morning? Slowly, the question filtered through to my sleep-addled brain. "Which exact morning is this?". I didn't remember. Then I did. It was a weekday morning. D'oh. I tried to get up, but couldn't bring myself to move. I lay there in mourning for the lost innocence. Once it was a morning of snoozing and freedom, but now it's been interrupted by the fact that I'd only wished for it to be a morning of snoozing and freedom. Work calls. Workmen call. In this case, the workman has a key to the house and is shouting a morning hello.

I got up (there's nothing like a stranger in your house to make you feel like not being found in bed). I shouted down a hello to the workman. Nice guy. I then unpacked my new computer while getting dressed. It seems nice. The sound's a bit tinny - the speakers on my soon-to-be-ex-laptop were delightfully throaty, I'll miss them. I got my new machine working on the internet and then stopped doing any more. It seems like it's probably fast enough for my purposes. It's hard to tell. I've not used it for anything yet. I don't even know what sockets it's got. I didn't bother looking. It fits into the new bag nicely enough. And that's that.

Tonight there's a visit from the heating engineer. We'll have a good look round and work out exactly what work he's going to unleash on my home. It will be about two and half weeks before he unleashes the workmen, which, all things being equal, isn't too bad. I'll have been a whole month without heating, which hasn't proved to be so bad. The irony of the situation is that I won't be able to take a shower when he's done, because I'll probably have just finished stripping the bathroom out when the heating system "goes live". D'oh!

Still, every day I'm in the house and it's not getting closer to being ready costs me about a tank's worth of petrol (rather than use money to quantify it, I'll use goods). There's no snooze button on the house, sadly. So, let the work continue!

Labels: DIY, heating, house, plumbing, snooze

My life is a series of electrical impulses. This is not so much profound as factual. While my personality and behaviour is undoubtedly a product of the various electrons running through my brain, even my day-to-day life is governed by electrical things. For instance, I'm presently bothered about my phone, which has an annoying habit of turning its screen light on every minute or so, and thus wearing out its battery. To try to fix the problem requires me first to backup my contacts, which is another problem in itself. I'm nearly there. I've turned the phone off for now to ensure I have power tomorrow when I need it. The charger is at work and the phone, unlike EVERY Nokia I've had in the last FIVE or so years (probably more), has a new charging socket. Sad.

The other electrical thing governing my life involves screens. The new TV is a joy to watch, and watch it I do. I still haven't sorted out its aerial, but I have plenty of DVDs to watch - Scrubs won't watch itself, and I've been buying Vic Reeves DVDs recently too. I really must hook up my freeview box too. The other screens, of course, are computer screens. If it were not for computer screens, I probably wouldn't have gainful employment the way that I do, though I guess I could still use a whiteboard for something. Of particular note, when it comes to screens, is the broken screen on my laptop. This has caused me to buy a replacement laptop. It has also caused me to use the existing laptop at a really uncomfortable angle... until a few seconds ago, when I discovered a clever trick for geting the screen to work absolutely perfectly at the angle I want to use it at.

So, have I just wasted the price of a new laptop?

No. This one was begging to be replaced. I finally found an excuse. I couldn't make an excuse with the inconvenience of its CD drive not writing discs - I bought an external writer. I couldn't make the excuse for replacement from the fact that the CD drive stopped working as I had an external one by then, and the drive works from time to time. I couldn't make an issue of the big crack in the case - it's just a crack - or the small hard drive - I just archived off some data. What about screen size? Get a life! Battery life - I rarely use it off the lead (well, that's probably why the battery's screwed!).

So, I was just going to live with all the problems and antiquities of the machine. Hell, I'd even upgraded it to the more recent version of Windows XP. Then the screen problem came and I decided, in seconds, to get a new machine. Quite right too. I should have a fancy machine with a widescreen display and a fast dual-core CPU. So, I have one on its way by the end of next week - that's the end of next week when I have my first gig in, like, ages, and so will not be wanting to mess about with a new computer. I will.

Anyway, I've just worked out a way of fixing this screen. It's not permanent and it will probably go wrong, the moment it's closed again. However, it means that this laptop will be useful to me for the next week, and I know someone who will make use of it beyond then. So, no harm done.

Other electrical things (following on the electrical theme). I learned an important lesson today. Don't work on live electrical cables. Don't. If you do, then don't. If you must, then it's probably best not to do it on an old fuse box without an RCD. If you do work on live cables on a fuse box without an RCD, then it's best not to hold an earthed casing in one hand while working on the live cable with the other. If you've come this far and still ignored my advice (well, it's my advice now), then at the very least don't use a metal screwdriver. Apparently, the result of this foolishness is some sort of current running across your body from live to earth.

Still, some lessons come basically for free. Nothing was broken, or burned, or damaged, or fused or anything. Just a very shamefaced me, taking myself aside for some man-to-himself time to explain "See what you did there". I got a coffee break out of it, though.

Very foolish indeed. What a knob!

However, despite my attempts to kill myself with foolishness, a lot of work has been completed today between 10am and 6pm. Not all of that time was spent working. Some 90 minutes of that was a "chat" with the roofer. A further hour or so was the time it took to get lunch and eat it. However, the price of lunch also bought me an accomplice for the afternoon, so more was achieved.

I also can't drain radiators in a way which causes no mess. Luckily, the mess was limited to some bare old floorboards.

Oh, and I recommend spending extra on a good mop bucket. A bucket whose squeezer-outer shatters on any downward force is probably a false economy.

So much to learn.

Labels: computers, DIY, electrical safety, laptop

Nobody is more surprised than I am that I'm actually feeling motivated to do things around this new house. Especially after the last two nights, where I was rather useless, opting for the quick win over anything that was genuinely difficult-looking, I was quite stunned to become a flurry of activity between arriving home this evening at about 8.30, and calling it a night at about 11.30.

"What can be done in 3 hours?" I pretend to hear you cry. Well, I'd had a brief sojourn to the house before going out for dinner and I had chipped off the fake-tile-made-of-polyfilla from the ceiling in the hall. Deciding that the house would be a better place to work if I kept it tidy, I set about dealing with random bits of debris. I started by vacuuming some of the upstairs. Then the stairs. Then I swept up the bits of my chiseling. Then I decided to do another quick win with the ceiling tiles in the bathroom. This extended itself to removing an old heater from the wall and a number of random screws. Then I tidied that up.

To be honest, though working hardish, I was procrastinating. I had been dreading some particularly evil wallpaper stripping in the downstairs front room. However, the time came. I'd have to say that wallpaper stripping is a little like surprise breasts. "What are surprise breasts?" I hallucinate an audience annunciating. Well, surprise breasts are breasts of a pleasant magnitude and shape on a woman - this is not unusual. However, the surprise is that no matter how hard you try to remember exactly how fullsome and shapely these bosoms are, the moment you next see them, you are impressed anew with their assets. I apologise for the laddish nature of this description. So, as with surprise breasts, so wallpaper stripping is a surprisingly unpleasant job, no matter how unpleasant you expect it to be.

I worked at this room for long enough to get it all off and draw a little blood. Then I tidied up the kitchen (I'm leaving the tidying up of the wallpaper stripping for the morning). I even washed up, which was an excuse to wash my hands in warm water - the gift of two kettles' worth of boiling. It's amazing what a new sink plug can do to keep liquid in a sink for once!

Then upstairs to bed, perchance to go online.

So, a bit of blogging, the discovery that I have a gig in a few days (woo) and then to sleep, perchance to remember to wake up in the morning and do more slaving. I have a roofer coming at midday, and I'd like my hallway's paper-removal to be over by then.

Labels: DIY

I should probably have gone back to the house and started intensive work on the house. There's plastering to do next week (not me) and if there's wallpaper to be stripped, it should be done before. However, after I was fed, I decided to get my broadband to work. This was something of a challenge. The cable modem is not ready to go the moment it's installed. No, you have to do some sort of registration. Dull. I called support. They don't speak to me on my terms, but on the two occasions that I've called NTL support, they've had a very straightforward approach which even I can follow and they've solved my problem.

I'm probably a nightmare to give computer support to, since I can see more about the problem than the average user. As a result, I'm blinded to the help that a support team can offer me. I'm too busy formulating my own theory for what the problem is and how to solve it. In fact, there were two problems (by the time I decided to call for help - only one when I started), and both were quickly solved. The NTL installation engineers had followed my instructions virtually to the letter, except for a variation that they invented themselves, which I approved of.

Anyway, I messed around getting the broadband to work, which was complicated by the combination of a few short network leads and the fact that my laptop is knackered. The knackeredness takes the form of the screen not working when it is fully, or even slightly open. At the moment, I'm in bed using it, but the screen is at about 60 degrees to my legs, and the laptop is inclined such that my hands are straining at the upper rows of the keyboard. It's not easy to use like this. In other respects it works, but the emails from Dell and Dabs tell me that the cavalry will be with me (by cavalry, I mean new laptop, new carry bag and some blank CDs for backups) in the next few weeks. I guess I'll have to say goodbye to this machine someday. Sad occasion that will be too.

Given that I wasted some of the night on the broadband, I still wanted to achieve something, so I set about a "quick win". A quick win is an easy or quick task that you can do, preferably with an obvious effect. In this case, I set about removing the ceiling tiles in the downstairs hall. These are large pieces of polystyrene glued to the ceiling. They're easily removed with a wallpaper removal tool... with the exception of those which seemed heavily bonded to the ceiling, and the ceiling tile which proved, on closer inspection, to be a huge cludge of polyfilla with lines drawn into it to make it appear to match the rest of the ceiling. How poor is that!

I tidied up after my quick win, which was, at least fairly thorough. I missed a couple of bits behind the emergency lighting, which needed properly taking off, and I didn't have my ladder available to do it at that moment. I also didn't chip off the polyfilla tile, but I can now see what I'm dealing with on the ceiling, and it looks fine. I may yet be able to paint it. It might need a reskim, but that's not the end of the world.

Quotes for the central heating came too, which was nice.

After much nagging, I got a fairly scary quote for some work in Newcastle, so I rang an alternative workman. He rang me back promptly and seemed to be much more realistic with his attitude and pricing. I'll see once he gives me the second quote. Being a landlord is a sort of fun if you don't mind spending large sums of money. Thing is, I do. I'm feeling a bit like money is draining out of me like air from a burst balloon. Still, it's all in a good cause.

If anyone knows the cause, please get in touch.

Why can't I buy Bill Bailey's "Cosmic Jam" for like £10 when I'm apparently happy to spend nearly £500 on computery things in one afternoon. Major weirdness!

Labels: computers, DIY, landlording, money