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Amelia was off in Spain with Mary so Emma, Oli and I took a trip into Liverpool to do an escape room. It was expensive and hot but very much fun. Oli was great – we were rubbish. On the way back we nipped into Albert Schloss and had the best beer and pretzels evahhhhhhhh

I finished a recent blog post with “But it’s done. Next step…how on earth am I going to manhandle the oak frame into place. This is going to be tough.”

I looked into hiring a machine to do the heavy lifting for me but it was going to be about £130 per day and with hindsight of how long it took it would have cost me about £1000 down that route. Luckily for me I have a lovely friend that owns a digger and a trailer. He dropped it off for me, gave me a hand with the first part of the build and then nobbed off on holiday leaving me to crack on with it at my leisure.

The first wall we put up was the one on the right

By the time we’d constructed the second wall of the frame I was getting a bit better at mortise and tenon joints – not brilliant….but definitely better. Before starting the build proper I spent an entire day making a mortise for the wind brace by hand with a hammer and chisel. Seriously….an entire day to make a practice mortise. I nearly cried. The realisation of how many mortise holes I had to make in this incredibly tough oak was soul destroying. So I rented a chain mortise. By the end of the build I could do a wind brace mortise in 10 minutes rather than 7 hours.

Three frame walls in and things were getting easier and quicker

My lap joints were also getting better given that I’d picked up a few tricks on using the chain mortiser to take material out of the beam and finish off with a hammer and chisel. Took me a while to work out that the measure ticks on the side of the mortiser took into account the curvature of the chain saw.

Things start getting a bit complicated when connecting the middle brace. There are two lap joints and two wind braces to consider so stuff really needs to line up. This one turned out pretty well, the wind brace is a bit loose but I’ll fix it in when the frame is finished and the stud walls have pulled everything square.

I had numerous special guest appearances from Uncle Chris who provided invaluable advice when it came to getting ratchet straps out and pulling the frame together. He’s a great engineer and can definitely wield a mallet.

Until finally we get to this

This is the phase that I always thought would be the hardest, and it definitely was. The brick laying was tough but I’ve done it before and knew it was a matter of patience. But manhandling 6m long 150mm square Oak beams was really really hard. Putting lap joints and mortises in there was tough. Manhandling them into place using a digger and mallets and ratchet straps with millimetre accuracy was insanely hard. Trying to get everything square…well that was beyond my capability. Things are a little wonky in places but hopefully the stud walls [ which are the next phase ] will neaten things up.

If I were building this again I’d probably do a better job as I picked up a few tricks along the way and the last few joints were way better than the first. I’d use longer tenons and deeper mortises but taking into account the bows in the beams is just a nightmare.

I watched a youTube video where a fella carved roman numerals into his beams so that he could easily identify which was which. This seemed like a stellar idea to me. So I copied him

But then I decided to go one better and start chiselling pagan symbolism into my shamanistic meditation and hallucinatory experience workshop beams.

My circular saw just wasn’t big enough to cut through the 150mm Oak beams. So I rented this fella for a morning to chop them all to size.

With hindsight I didn’t really need to. If I was doing it now I’d use my newly acquired skill saw…

to make cuts all the way around the beam and then finish it off with a hand saw. But you live and learn. The big arse circular saw certainly made it quicker.

Whilst we’re on the subject of new tools acquired for this project.

Saw these sliders in Aldi and just had to buy them

There’s also a pair of Lidl sliders available to buy but I may have missed the window of opportunity 🙁

I keep calling it a workshop but in reality I’ve got no idea what I’m going to do with it. Could become my art studio, or a sex dungeon. Maybe a VR room or a recording studio. Or maybe it’ll just end up being a really big shed. Whatever it’s going to be, the work has begun in earnest.

The oak beams that will form the load bearing frame arrived a while ago.

They don’t look like much on the picture above but the ones at the back are 6m long. All the beams are 150mm square and so the 6m bad boys weigh ummm I dunno how much but 5 of us struggled to get them off the delivery truck. Very heavy.

The builder people put a concrete slab in for me months ago as has been documented in an earlier post and I finally got around to buying some bricks and making a start on the construction. Bricks from my local building supplier were pretty expensive. Bricks online were slightly cheaper but I ended up nipping in to Huws Gray as they were right next door to the machinery hire place. Huws Gray had some clearance bricks that they were trying to get shut of. I didn’t really give a crap what the bricks looked like but they had to be 65mm and these bricks were. So I ordered 650 of these unbelievably cheap bricks and saved myself about £300.

There is limited access to the garden so the bricks and sand were offloaded near my gates and I had to wheelbarrow them up the the desired location.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m rubbish at laying bricks. I have much more of a “fuck it that’ll do” attitude than bricklayers really should. I’m much better at it now as I sit here typing this given that I’ve just picked up and mortared in a brick about 500 times. I can now tell when my mortar is wrong. I now appreciate the use of a piece of string and a spirit level. But when I first started this brick laying odyssey, I was pretty useless.

The first day I started laying bricks I made the fundamental mistake of not checking the weather. It started properly raining when I was about half way through using up my mix ( mortar ). The second mistake I made was then continuing to lay bricks as it rained. All that happens is the mortar becomes too wet and starts running everywhere. The third mistake was thinking that I had to force the brick into the mortar to get good adhesion – you really don’t have to – doing this just results in the mortar becoming too thin and all your brickwork height calculations ending up wrong. Probably the biggest mistake I made during this whole first day utter fucking disaster of laying bricks was that I thought I could do it whilst drinking several cans of Stella.

By the time I was onto the second course all sorts of memories of my father, who was a bricklayer, came flooding back. I spent a few weeks working with him one summer when I was a student. He didn’t need my help, he already had a labourer, I think he just wanted to spend some time with his son. Anyway, during this father son bonding period he taught me stuff…either that or my mind has completely made shit up. Stuff like wait an hour or two after your mortar has gone off and then point it. After pointing it go over all your new mortar with a stiff brush and scrub the excess from around the edges and the face of the brick work. Don’t lay brick until the very end of your row and force yourself into chopping a brick to make it work; instead meet in the middle and put your chopped brick in there. All sorts of stuff came back to me and course 2 was better than course 1, and course 3 was better than course 2. I really don’t claim to be an expert but brick laying no longer holds the fear for me that it did a few weeks ago.

It turns out my estimation for the number of bricks needed was pretty good. I initially estimated 600. When the Huws Gray bricks came in so cheaply I decided to buy an extra 50. I ended up with about 100 left over and plenty of sand and cement. It’ll all get used at some point as I need to build some new steps to my office and then just stuff.

All in all it was a pretty terrifying and physically demanding process. But it’s done. Next step…how on earth am I going to manhandle the oak frame into place. This is going to be tough.

Amelia and I were on our way to Blackpool to have fun on the pleasure beach. As we set off my car flashed up a warning about the level of coolant. We had some time to spare so we nipped to the car shop place nearby and bought some coolant. I opened up the bonnet, Identified the oil thingy. There was only one other lid which I therefore assumed was the coolant so I added a bit.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and the coolant thing came up again. I opened the “coolant” flap and had a look, it was fine. So I ignored it.

A week later the coolant thing alerted me again but this time the engine temperature hit the max level whilst idling. This was not right. I did a proper investigation. Turns out underneath a flap in the engine is the coolant reservoir. So, hang on a minute, thought I. Where the fuck did I pour that last lot of coolant? Apparently I added coolant to the power steering reservoir. A quick google search about this reveals this is really really really bad. Like power steering system destroying bad. Several thousand pounds in repairs bad. So I flushed the system

This is the milky coloured shit that came out of my system. Not groovy.

This would be the thing I thought was the coolant, but is actually the power steering thing with the return ummmmmmm thing disconnected, so I could flush it. Took me 5 litres of power steering fluid at £10 a pop to sort it out. But it was worth it

Back when we did the extension we had a bunch of planters built and filled them with flowers. In front of the planters we laid a few breeze blocks and covered them with render with the intention of building some benches out there. Since I was buying a load of oak to build a workshop at the end of my garden…more on that soon…I got a few bench slats thrown onto the delivery.

Whilst waiting for the oak to be delivered I took some 4×2 and laid it out to see how it would perform over such a large span.

Not cut to size or anything, just playing around. The short span at the end of the picture was absolutely rock solid. But the large span was just rubbish. It was going to need some steel to brace it.

The oak arrived and I cut it all to size and laid it out.

After clearing some space in my garage I managed to set up my wood horses and add some Osmo Garden Furniture Oil to preserve them a bit better.

The steel finally arrived and I used some rawl plugs and screws to fix the steel supports in,

It worked pretty well until about 2 seconds after I took this photo when the entire bench dropped an inch having ripped the screws out of the top mounting point. I was a bit worried this would happen so I made a trip to the local hardware shop for some concrete fixings. Then I made a trip back to the shop to buy a 12mm masonry drill as my 12mm cheap crappy SDS drill from Aldi was bent and ended up making a 15mm hole rather than a 12mm hole. Then I used my concrete fixings and it’s definitely so far so good. When the screws were ripped out it made a bit of a mess of the render but I have a cunning plan to patch it up again.

Charlie and I went to watch Roger Waters doing his allegedly farewell tour. It was an absolutely epic day out and a fantastic performance.

£8 per pint though – robbing bastards

I’ve got electric garage doors. You may remember that from an earlier blog post where I managed to close the garage doors on my car before fitting sensors. Well now I’ve gone one better and made it so that I can open and close my garage doors with my phone.

It all began in January 2023 when I bought some spare remote control garage fobs, synced them up with my garage doors and then ripped them apart. I used an oscilloscope to determine which pins on the chip went high when I opened and closed the doors and then I delicately soldered some wires to the chip and then hooked them up to a raspberry pi [ of course ]

Now, my electronics has always been a bit rubbish but I knew that the raspberry pi GPIO pins ran at 3.3 volts. Also, I knew that the battery powering the fob was running at 3.3 volts so I just made a direct connection. It worked first time. I was amazed that I could open my garage from the end of the garden. The remotes had never been that powerful before.

Then came a problem. It stopped working after the first go. It confused me for a while…quite a while…about three remote control key fobs at £20 a pop. I thought maybe I’d damaged the processor when soldering so I again hooked up my oscilloscope to see which side of the switches were ground and I hooked my wires up to them to keep some distance away from the delicate microprocessor. Again it worked for a while and then stopped working.

One day I had an epiphany. “It’s the current! The signals from the raspberry pi are blowing up the processor”. So with a really simple fix of dropping a 55k resistor between the pi and the remote control everything worked well.

At this point I only hooked up one door and I could just make it go up or down as I hadn’t soldered up the stop button. Fast forward a few months and I bought another remote control for the second door, ripped it apart and soldered up all three buttons [ up, down and stop ] and whilst I was at it I took the first remote control and soldered the stop wire onto that too.

The finished item looks rather like an IED

Then of course there is the mobile phone app which powers the whole thing and the python based flask server running on the raspberry pi that does all the real work of driving GPIO pins and such

Yotam Ottolenghi has a recipe for Black Pepper Tofu. I made it many years ago and loved it, although it was pretty spicy. Fast forward many years to present day and I’m walking through the middle aisle of Aldi and I spotted some Tofu. I thought I’d give it another go.

Turns out the middle aisle Aldi Tofu was a bit rubbish. It was too soft and just crumbled in the pan. However, a few weeks later I spotted a new “super Firm Organic Tofu” on the shelf and thought “oi oi”

So I bought the chilli’s and shallots, ensured we had enough black pepper, fired up the frying pan and boom….

It was truly a thing of beauty.

The kids mostly pulled their faces, ate a bit and put the rest in the bin.

Jason Howarth described it as “offensive” and “a fucking abomination”

I’ll maybe use less black pepper next time.

We live in a pretty rural area. Our broadband was rubbish and every time the wind blew the connection would go down. So we got rid of that and used a 4G unlimited data SIM. This was a bit better but the DHCP lease time meant the connection would drop for a little while every 3 days and the IP address would change which meant some stuff on my network would need restarting. This was a pain. Things got a bit better when I introduced another 4G SIM but it still wasn’t ideal. The data rates weren’t that great either and Oli would always be moaning about it all being a bit laggy and slow.

One evening, after a little bit of wine, I noticed that Starlink had dropped the price of their kit in the UK. I asked Oli if he’d be willing to pay for half the kit to speed up his connection – he absolutely was – so I finally pulled the trigger on buying Starlink after years of talking about it.

It finally arrived a week after it was supposed to. The road at the end of my lane was shut and so you had to come in from the other end of the bumpy lane. The DHL driver [ the lazy bastard ] just couldn’t be bothered. Three times they “tried to deliver” it. Three times they utterly couldn’t be arsed. In the end I had to redirect it to a shop pickup point thing and go and get it myself. Fucking DHL.

Whilst waiting for the mounting post to arrive so that I could attach it to my garage I just set it up on the roof outside Oli’s window and ran the cable into his PC. We were getting absolutely blistering speeds and latency was much lower. It’s a whole new internet experience

Finally the mounting post came and I could properly integrate Dishy McFlatFace into my home network and have a 4G SIM as a failover in case those sneaky Chinese bastards ever make good on their threats of blowing the Starlink satellites out of space.

Once everything was integrated into the network I ran around various locations in the house to see what speeds I was getting. My office….super fast. My garage…super fast. Oli’s room…super fast. My kitchen…rubbish. This puzzled me for a while but I plugged the AP straight into the switch in my utility room and then it was super fast. This was a relief as I was worried the cable from my garage to the house was bad…this would have been a massive PITA. Instead it was the cable from my utility room to the kitchen. This is still a potential pain in the ass as it goes through a stud wall and into the ceiling. Before I started pulling cables out of walls and putting new ones in I did a network test. The Ethernet tester in the utility room went 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 so was all good. The tester on the kitchen end went something bonkers like 1, 2, 6, 3, 5, 4, 7, 8. So all this time the Ethernet cable had been done wrong but it was limping along on 4 wires hence the poor data speeds. I’d never noticed the poor data speeds until Starlink came along with my super fast connection.

I chopped the end off and had another go at wiring it up. My least favourite job in the world is wiring up Cat 6 terminators. Anyway, it worked first time and now my kitchen is super fast too.

We used to heat our house with heating oil but I always hated it. It smells, it’s carcinogenic, it’s not environmentally friendly in any way. I finally got rid of it.

This is me getting the last of the oil out and selling it to my neighbour at a very discounted price.

My plan was to sell it on eBay as they’re really quite expensive. However it turns out my tank is single skinned which is really not cool these days. People are still trying to sell them on eBay but nobody is buying so I decided to not bother going down that path.

Out comes the trusty Ryobi jigsaw. I only knackered 2 blades during the entire process. Not bad for me.

All stacked up ready for the tip. It took me three trips to get rid of everything and even though I jet washed the tank inside and out there was still a minging smell of kerosene as I was transporting it. But finally – after 16 years of putting up with my driveway stinking of heating oil it’s all over.

Two years in and I’m still not saying that I have retired…or that I haven’t retired. However I always celebrate the day I finished my last job with a massive breakfast

It was all a bit too much though…

Two hash browns [ carbs ] and half a slice of toast [ carbs ] left behind

In what can only be described as “probably not my best idea” I decided to remove a no longer used drain thingy with my car. I tried digging it out but it was taking ages and I got bored so I came up with the cunning plan above. You may be wondering why I put a brick inside the rope. Well my genius thoughts were that it would distribute the load onto the plastic drain thingy so that the rope didn’t just cut through it. Again, not my best idea as it instantly became a projectile heading straight for my car.

The plastic drain thing clattered into my car but these Porsches are made of tough stuff. No damage occurred thankfully.

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.