Category: Stuff I build

We’ve always had this space in our bathroom that was just crying out for some shelves. I just happened to have an Oak beam left over from my Workshop build which would turn into some rather lovely shelves.

So I popped around to Dan’s house and we machined the beam into some usable planks

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The next step was to fashion some supports and break out the digital spirit level that I borrowed off Jason Howarth.

Finally the oiled shelves were put in place.

Quite happy with the way it all turned out.

It was about two years ago that I started building my workshop and pretty much managed to complete it in six months. I say “pretty much” because I never quite got around to putting fascia boards on it so the front and back roofy bits always looked a bit scruffy.

Well….no more

So the fascia boards are the bits of wood that make the top triangle.

Now you can see that because I didn’t know what I was doing I didn’t put a load of nails into the cladding which is why you can now see a bunch of the boards starting to warp. Fortunately I still have some nail gun nails so I’ll have to rent my favourite power tool from Hodgsons, mark out where the stud walls are and then shoot a load more nails in. Sounds like a job for the Summer.

Being the early rising dutiful husband that I am I often greet Emma with a cup of tea in the morning. On normal days I’ll have a quick look at what time she set the alarm for and I’ll make tea and take it upstairs just in time to switch off her alarm and then we settle in with tea to do the Guardian crossword.

This is fine except for weekends. She doesn’t set an alarm on weekends. So I’d always in the past try and pick a reasonable time and wander up. This seldom worked out. She’d either be fast asleep or she’d come downstairs before I made tea. This situation could not persist.

A long long time ago Amazon released these really quite cool things called “Amazon Dash Buttons” where you would hook them up to your WiFi and when you press the Dash Button it would contact the Amazon Mothership and order you another whatever, box of teabags, toilet roll, dishwasher tablets – whatever it was set up for.

So I bought one on eBay.

A lot of the info on the web talked about them having a soldered in flat battery which was going to be a pain. After taking my Dremel to the button I discovered that the version I had was filled with a AAA battery. So I replaced the battery and got to configuring my firewall so that the MAC address of the Dash Button couldn’t get outside my network since it seems Amazon are being a bunch of dicks about this sort of thing and remotely bricking any devices that contact the server.

After much hacking involving playing some audio into the Dash Button, performing a factory reset, and then using a Python script to configure the button for my IOT network I had the beginnings of a solution. I have a Raspberry Pi that was already doing a few things and now it also sits and listens for an ARP packet from the MAC address of the Dash Button. When it receives the ARP it will then call a Telegram script that I wrote which will message my phone with a “Bring Tea” message.

So far so good – but there’s no ACK. I could go to the bottom of the stairs and shout up “OK, tea incoming” but that would just wake everyone else up. So I released the hounds…well hound.

Violet, our pet Whippet loves getting in bed with us when we’re doing the crossword. So the sequence of events is now:

Emma wakes up.

Presses the tea button.

I open the door for Violet and she runs upstairs and gets in bed with Emma

I make tea and take it upstairs.

We complete the crossword and the nine-letter anagram.

Quite a long time ago I had a new garage built https://junglefreedomfighters.com/?p=1320

Not long after it started getting these minging scuffs on the front of it making the whole garage door look a bit rubbish. I couldn’t work out what was causing the problem so every now and then I’d give it a lick of spray paint and it would nice again, for a while.

Recently one of the locking straps snapped so I took it all apart and discovered that some of the plastic circle things that hold the locking straps in place had snapped too. So I ordered a bunch of bits from eBay and set to work. Whilst I was doing all this I noticed that there were scuff marks on the inside of the steel housing that corresponded with the scuff marks on the door. That was it! That was what was cacking up my doors. Upon closer inspection it seemed the top part of the steel housing was bowing down a bit – no idea why but I put a small hole in it with a metal drill, stuck a 100mm torx screw through the hole and screwed it into a roof support above. Screwing the screw in raised the housing top higher and no more scuffing occurred. A jet wash and a bit of spray paint later and we have this

Many years ago we bought a shoe rack basket type thing. Over time it fell apart and I did a patch up job on it with a few screws. It didn’t work very well and started falling apart again. The final straw came when Amelia fell onto it and the whole thing just crumbled and and fell apart. Emma wanted to put it in the bin. I wanted to do a proper fix up job on it.

Bits missing, wood snapped – this will not do

Starting to put it back together. Glued and dowelled. No screws whatsoever…well, except to hold the wicker seats on.

Almost back together. Undercoat being applied.

The finished piece. You can sit on it and everything.

Quite proud of myself.

When we remodelled the driveway there were some casualties. Namely several fence panels that had over the years been ravaged by the elements and by ground ivy. So rather than buying new fence panels at ridiculous post pandemic prices, I thought I’d make my own.

I took some measurements off one of the old weather damaged fence panels and set up my trusty mitre saw to do some cuts.

When I first started building a panel I would chop all the planks in half. Then I’d set the angle on the mitre saw, then I’d chop individual planks one at a time always measuring and remeasuring the place where the cut is going to be.

By the time I’d got to my 5th fence panel I’d built a rudimentary jig to hold the planks and was cutting through them 3 or 4 at a time. It got a lot faster to build each panel!

In a similar vein when it came to assembling the panel I was pretty slow for the first few, but after each panel I learned a new time saving trick and also got a bit more accurate so the later panels were much faster to put together and a lot straighter.

Finally I got around to digging some holes, buying some 75×75 fence posts and a few bags of postfix. I know hand mixing concrete apparently makes for a better, more secure fence post but you just can’t argue with the simplicity of “dig a hole, throw some water in, add your fence post, throw some postfix in and maybe a bit more water and you’re done”

The more or less finished job. I had to put a few more panels up off to the left of the picture above but you get the idea. The fence panel planks have been pressure treated to greater or lesser degrees which is why there is some colour variation but I suspect they’ll all fade to the same colour after a year or two. I don’t really mind though, quite like the multi coloured fence panels.

Quite a long time ago, before we went sailing in Croatia, I started painting the flat roof that the lazy bastard roofer couldn’t be bothered finishing. It began here

https://junglefreedomfighters.com/?p=2433

Well finally….finally….absolutely finally I got around to finishing it off. It was an enormous relief – something that had been preying on my mind for quite a while so I finally got myself together and did the final touch up under the roof-lights. It didn’t take long, not half as long as I thought it would, and it’s turned out quite well.

I sat on the roof with a can of Stella or two beneath a beautiful blue sky on a crisp autumnal day and I was truly happy.

I spend my entire life fixing stuff. I’m absolutely convinced that when I leave the house my family just wander around with a hammer smashing stuff. This time they didn’t even wait for me to leave the house. I was in bed when I heard a huge crash. Sounded like a light aircraft had crashed into the side of the house. Turns out it was just the shower screen and “nobody” was in the bathroom. It was either Emma crashing the door into the screen or the resident ghost Maude

Anyway, this was the result:

After really rather a lot of tidying up we ended up with a shower that was vaguely usable but fortunately we also had a proper backup electric shower downstairs. Anyway – the upstairs clean up looked like this:

After far too long waiting for a delivery of a new piece of glass and a rather talented plumber/bathroom fitter coming to sort it out we are now able to wash our stinky Steele bodies upstairs again.

I hate to raise this again but a couple of years ago we had an extension built. Yes, this saga rumbles on!

Well, the lazy bastard roofer never came back and finished the job. So after two years of looking at it and not knowing what to do I watched a couple of youTube videos and now apparently I’m a roofer.

Step one, jet wash and brush away all the crap that has built up over the years.

Done

Eight bulk bags of 20mm and 10mm Gold Coast gravel and we have a driveway. Quite happy with the way it’s turned out although the new neighbours friends keep mistaking it for a car park and parking their cars on it!

I wanted to make some rudimentary window frames on my workshop. Since I heinously miscalculated the amount of really quite expensive Larch I would need I managed to end up with quite a bit leftover. The Larch that I have leftover is currently being used as a temporary workbench and I have plans to build a wheelie bin enclosure with it, a pet shelter in the garden and the sides and maybe roof for a wood store. Yeah, I really have that much left over!

But in the meantime, I thought I’d use it for my “window frames”. The only thing left was deciding to whether or not to have a top framey bit hangovery bit. So I tried one of each.

The one above is kinda square and flush. The one below has a little hangover flourish at the top. It’s also the design that we all prefer so I’ll be changing the one above…when things get a bit warmer.

Since the weather is starting to cool down quite significantly in the UK it was a final rush to get the workshop weatherproof, or watertight if you prefer.

The cladding turned up about a week earlier than expected and it coincided with some good weather in the UK so I dropped pretty much everything in my life and cracked on with it.

Putting up 3m lengths of cladding on the walls on my own was a bit tricky. I ended up utilising some 4×2 of various lengths to act like a second person helping me. It was slow going at first but once into the groove it worked out pretty well. The first “panel” that I clad…

… probably took me about 3 hours. By the time I got to the last panel it took me about 40 minutes. I always start anything new on this “hidden” side by the bushes so I can make all my mistakes well out of view.

Doing the top bit of the cladding, above the oak beam, was a bit tricky. I had to cut angles on each side to tie in with the shape of the stud walls and the roof beam. I then had to climb up on my platform and pin them in. The very top ones were put in using a ladder. The only good thing about it was as the cladding got higher up the frame it was also lighter to carry.

When I first started this project I cut almost everything with a table saw. It’s safe, accurate and pretty easy. By the end I was a dab hand with my angle measuring thing above and a skill saw. Went so much faster and there’s so much more flexibility in the cuts one can make.

I looked into various garage door options. The one that stood out to me was Crocodile. They’re not the cheapest out there by a long way but they do seem to be the best. They sent somebody around to inspect the site. They sent another fella around to properly measure up and work out all the details and finally they sent out two fine fellas that did the installation. Fortunately we could mount the door on the back of the frame so we managed to get past the problem of my door not being quite square which is something I was worried about. The garage door fitters even pointed out why I’ve been having scuffing problems with the doors on my garage and told me how to fix it.

The end result…

It’s still very much a work in progress. I need to add some fascia boards to the front and back. I need to add guttering down the sides and some downpipes into a soakaway. Need to fit a wood burning stove in there and also seal/paint the floor. Then I can start filling it with toys! But the happy point now is that I can sit back and wait for the weather to warm up before doing all that kind of stuff.

Given that it was starting to get cold and that the slates were working out incredibly expensive aaaaand I had six rolls of felt in my garage I decided to buy some OSB and felt my roof to get me through the winter.

Here it is with all the OSB up and the beginnings of a pretty bad bit of felting being done. Getting the OSB and felt up was very hard work and I couldn’t have accomplished it without the help of Oli.

After finishing the felting I took the waterproof membrane and started stapling it over the stud walls.

The next step was putting the windows in. The windows were bought off eBay for £70. I just chose the windows that were the cheapest and in roughly the size that I wanted then I built the stud walls to fit the windows.

This was about the time storm Ciaron made an appearance so I started running around the workshop and tacking fence panels up to protect the membrane. I also added some batons to the membrane up high in the triangle bits to keep everything intact. As I write this it’s all still in place and the cladding should arrive in 2-3 weeks to “finish” the outside.

I have my own nail gun. It’s a little one for doing quite small jobs like pinning T&G to the outside of the OG shed, maybe a light bit of furniture work or attaching a skirting board. What I needed was a kick ass nail gun capable of firing 90mm nails into a rafter and holding up the roof of my new building.

Fortunately – as always – Hodgsons had one.

This is by far the best tool I’ve ever hired. It’s heavy, it’s loud it’s dangerous. It’s just every man’s dream.

I was almost sad when I had to return it to the hire place. Fortunately I’ll probably rent it again when it comes time to putting the cladding up. I could use a hammer but at £24 quid for a days rental why would I bother with a hammer?