Darren Steele

If you’re a fan of British cartoons then you may recognise my dog.

and if you’re not a fan then…

A long long time ago Bill built us some cabinets and bookcases in the “wooden floor room”. They covered one wall of the room either side of the chimney breast and extended over the doorway to the the “carpet room”. After the extension was complete we had a whole other wall doing nothing in the wooden floor room since we have moved a doorway. Given that we also had a whole load of books in storage because we couldn’t fit them on the shelves I decided a new set of matching bookcases were in order…and I would build them myself.

The cynical amongst you will view this an excuse to buy a new Ryobi electric plane. It’s a thing of beauty.

Anyway…the base. Some left over 6×2 that was used as my roof beams in my front shed formed a sturdy base for the cases to sit atop.

My initial plan was to cover the 3.6m wall with three equally sized bookcases of 1.2m each. This meant that the light switch would have been inside one of the bookcases which I thought would have been kinda cool. Emma and Amelia disagreed so I let them have their way. The problem is that I’d already made a 1.2m bookcase.

The upshot of building it on the floor raised it’s head when I realised the base it was on wasn’t quite level. It doesn’t seem like a massive problem until you put a large bookcase on there and then everything is thrown out. I put some spacers underneath the base and redid the shelves so that they were level. It’s all still a tiny bit wonky but this is typical of one of my projects.

When I built the next bookcase I thought I’d have the shelves not lining up. So the whole thing looked a bit asymmetrical but having taken a look at them afterwards, and following feedback from Emma and Amelia, I decided to abandon that idea and keep the bookcases level.

Annoyingly I didn’t get a picture of my shelves when they were asymmetrical, but it just looked wrong. Looks miles better above. I also extended the top shelf over the “discovered doorway” that had been bricked up for who knows how long! I then had to build some padding onto the top of the existing shelves so that my shelf above the doorway would wrap around the corner and join up neatly with the existing shelves.

In case you’re wondering why I needed to buy a new electric plane it was for the skirting board you can see underneath the shelves. I had the wood yard cut the 7inch lambs tongue skirting down to 6inch. However because the floor/base is slightly bowed I needed to shave a couple of mm of the skirting. Probably could have done it by hand over a few hours…or buy a new bit of kit and have it done in a few minutes.

Conclusion

Probably would have been cheaper and quicker to buy them from Ikea. Possibly would have ended with a better finish without gaps here and there, but they wouldn’t have tied in with my existing bookcases and this blog would be “bought some bookshelves from Ikea and put them up in a couple of hours…here they are” – which would be a rubbish blog post.

As part of the deal with the property developers building houses around us I was promised a concrete slab. I initially started out asking for a 5x5m slab or smaller. But in the end I thought a 6x6m slab would be more useful for a workshop. So I pegged out roughly where I wanted it.

Then the builders came along with their digger.

Finally the day came and they poured the concrete. Proper bunch of perfectionists, they did a much better job than I ever could have – but then again they’re builders rather than…well, whatever I am. They had levels and machines they looked through to make sure it was the correct height and everything.

Now I just need to buy some bits of wood and build a workshop.

Once again my car has broken down. This time on the way to visit Herr Howarth. It was the coldest day of the year thus far and everything was going wrong on the motorways. My windscreen washers ran out of fluid so I stopped at the services to buy more but they’d sold out due to everyone running out. I ended up just buying a bottle of water and dumping that into my washers…which immediately froze and was simply cock all use. After refilling my washers with ice the car absolutely did not want to start. Finally it kicked in and the engine started but it freaked me out so much that I didn’t want to stop anywhere again until I got to the relative safety of Jason’s house.

Due to my windscreen being incredibly difficult to see through and my sat-nav being an utter bitch and trying to take me to Jason’s via the toll road I missed the A500 exit from the M6. Then my car started chugging when idling which is always a bad sign. Then it properly stopped on the toll road with a massive puff of smoke out of the exhaust and I rolled onto the hard shoulder.

This is where the fun properly began. I have AA cover via my Nationwide account. So I called the AA. Twenty minutes later they didn’t pick up the phone. So I dropped that call and phoned Paul who was coming down the M6 behind me. I arranged for him to rendezvous with me to try and work out what to do. Having arranged the meeting with Paul I got back onto the phone to the AA. Twenty five minutes later they hadn’t answered so I hung up and spoke with Paul to talk him into my exact location. Paul eventually arrived and I hung up an unanswered call to the AA for a third time. Wankers. In the end I just abandoned my car on the hard shoulder and jumped into Paul’s nice warm car and we went to the pub for lunch.

Fast forward many hours and I eventually managed to get through to the AA. I told them to pick up my car and tow it back to my house. They were absolutely adamant they couldn’t tow my car unless I was there. I was thirty miles away…and drunk. So that wasn’t happening. In the end I properly lost my shit with them, the AA person hung up on me and I went to bed convinced the police were going to impound my car.

I awoke the next day and my first thought, the very first thing that entered my head was where’s my car now. How am I going to get home! To cut a very long story a little shorter I won’t go into the range anxiety that Paul and I suffered due to him not being able to charge his car overnight. But we eventually made it back to my car. I hopped over the fence to the motorway and ran down the embankment to my car armed with a Lithium Ion battery charger pack hoping to kick start my car. Amazingly 24hrs after abandoning it at the side of the motorway it was still there. The hazard lights were still going and everything. I was hooking up the battery booster just as the police turned up. Literally 3 minutes had passed between me getting to the car and the cops turning up wanting to impound it! Because I was there they didn’t impound it and after 40 minutes on the phone the AA answered the call [ again wankers! ] and arranged someone to come and rescue me. However, the AA weren’t going to tow me home. They arranged for a 3rd party recovery company to come and get me and tow me to the nearest services where at some point in the distant future another truck would come and get me. In a massive piece of good fortune the recovery company had a car due for pickup up North so it made sense for them to take me home and get the other car.

I was still thinking that the problem was the battery so I got the car dropped off at my local garage with the intention of them replacing the battery. However, because it was so close to Christmas everything was just crazy. It was Christmas eve before they took a look at it. Declared it wasn’t the battery and was probably something much more serious, possibly requiring a new engine! Which as one can imagine was a shit bit of news. Very fortunately Paul is friends with a mechanic who he overheard discussing a Porsche Cayenne issue with another friend that was exhibiting all the same symptoms as mine. Paul sweet talked the mechanic [ Alan ] into taking a look at my car and so in that lull between xmas and new year Paul came over and towed my car off the garage forecourt

As I write this it’s now over a month since I last drove my car and our current working theory is that an injector failed. Hopefully this is the case…it’ll be the third injector that has failed in two years which is a bit annoying but at least I’ll be back on the road. I’ll drive it for a few months and then treat myself to an EV of some description for my birthday,

However, the message I want you to take from this blog post is that the AA are a proper bunch of wankers. Absolute cunts. Fuck the AA.

We had a bit of a dinner party. I made fresh ravioli from home made pasta and had a fancy serrated pasta cutter [ borrowed from the neighbours ] and everything.

It was a while ago that I made them but I made three different varieties. One definitely had prawns in, one had chorizo and red pesto and one had some sort of mushroom and creme fraiche filling. They all could have done with more filling and I also forgot to drizzle olive oil over them at the end.

Emma made a Salmon en croute which was divine.

Yeah, it’s another story from me about extensions. This time, skirting boards. We opted to put in some beautiful oak skirting boards to give the kitchen/utility that fantastic finishing touch. The chap that put them in used a “butt joint” where you just cut the board at 90 degrees and butt it up against another skirting board in order to span a length greater than the skirting boards that you have. In theory it’s great, in practice it’s a bit jarring.

I decided that given time and patience [ hahahaha, yeah, me, patience ] I could do a better job. So I bought a load more skirting board. The first problem is that stuff that I got was 5mm ummm shorter/taller [ can’t remember which ] so I couldn’t tie the new stuff in with the old stuff. That’s ok though – when the skirting is on different sides of the room or indeed in different rooms then you’ll never notice a 5mm difference.

So with the skirting above I eventually put a mitre joint in…and it still looks shit since the oak is different patterns/colourings where they join. Had it been a standard piece of skirting that I subsequently painted then it would be beautiful.

Then it comes to the corners. Despite it being new walls the corners are not 90 degrees which leads to all sorts of grief. I had to buy a coping saw that you use to cut the outline of the profile and then you can put it up against a perpendicular skirting board and you get a perfect join…in theory. In reality, because I’m rubbish at this sort of thing – it looks shit.

So I spent about £200 on new skirting board, wasting three or four days of my life to oil the boards and then try to fit them and it could be argued that I’ve gone backwards. I’ll probably have another crack at it later this year. Never give up and all that!

Back in 2014 I bought myself a new ride on mower after nearly slicing off the bottom of my foot with the old one. This one was/is a mulching mower that allows me to change the cutting blades and insert a plug into the collection chute and then the blades just chop the grass into tiny pieces and drop them back on the lawn…hence the term mulching.

All was going pretty well until I tried to “mulch” a protruding cobble stone which bent the blade which destroyed the plug.

In the background of the photo above you can see the newly purchased plug. It’s just the plug bit and all the fixings are reused from the old one.

As an aside, you see how the picture above is beautifully brightly lit. Well, let me take you on a little side quest….

The bench at the back of my garage isn’t terribly well lit. I have a desk lamp [ see below ] on there which can be used to illuminate small areas – but nothing for the big stuff. The mulching plug above is “big stuff” so something had to be done. Several years ago Emma bought some stage lights cheaply off eBay or facebook marketplace or something for an upcoming gig in our garden by The Inkbirds [ nephew Charlie ]so I decided to make use of one of them.

The only problem was it had a weird 3 hole rectangular power coupling, and the cable was about two feet long. So I snipped off the cable and took some flex I had. Soldered and insulated the wires and then stuck a plug on the end.

Then I mounted the stage light on a handy beam above my workbench and switched it on. Now I have a nice bright workbench and a warm head!

Anyway…back to the mulching plug

After a couple of hours buggering about with the lighting for repairing my mulching plug it ultimately took me about ten minutes to replace the plug section with the new one and I now have this thing of beauty.

Don’t even get me started with the saga that was putting a fresh set of mulching blades on my mower. It finished with me tearing something in my shoulder and being unable to sleep on my left side for two weeks.

The builders are starting work at the end of the garden. Chopping down trees and stuff.

We sold a bit of our land to the property developers who reckoned it was theirs. I’d rather not have sold it but they gave us a decent price and I wasn’t mad keen on a court battle. I decided to get rid of a lot of the rubbish that was on the land and have one final fire on the area behind my office.

As a result of me having such a big fire I might have inadvertently set fire to my wood store…a bit

I didn’t intend burning my woodstore down. It would have had to be moved anyway so it saved me a bit of a job. But I was really hoping to keep the roof and the uprights….and some of the wood. But it’s a bit late for that now I suppose 🙁 It was always a bad idea to have a fire so close to a woodstore anyway. Kinda surprised it lasted this long really.