Jungle Freedom Fighters

After a few days of hanging out with Charlie and James in Manchester the last job before heading home was to add a lick of paint to the skirting boards in the practice room/recording studio.

Picked up this bad boy during a trip to Afflecks Palace with Charlie. I got a belt and he got two piercings then we went to the pub. All in all quite an epic trip. I even managed to fit in a Chicken Jalfrezi and garlic naan from ‘spoons.

Sweet potato fritters with lashings of smoked paprika. Pretty damned good if you ask me

My Mum bought me this wheelbarrow a few years ago. I wanted this one because it had a non puncturable wheel and with the number of Hawthorn bushes we have it’s pretty important. Anyway, after carrying around tonnes upon tonnes of stone, paving slabs, wood and all sorts of other crap – it kinda started falling apart.

The bolts holding the lifting arms to the bucket had worn through the bucket and so it was a bit wobbly.

A quick trip to the local hardware store for some big ass washers for the princely sum of £0.60 [ it would have been less but I bought 4 washers rather than the 2 I needed in case the the 2 I needed didn’t work out…complex stuff ] the wheelbarrow is back to being a thing of beauty.

I used to regularly do yearly or indeed quarterly challenges, but I don’t think I’ve done one for a while. So this year I opted to buy a new belt each month. Mainly because I just had the standard boring brown and black belts with the hoopy toothy thing. You know, like a normal belt! Anyway…here is the January belt – bought off eBay because I couldn’t find one in proper shops that I liked

This challenge will of course have the unfortunate side effect of the internet getting a close up of my crotch – but we all have our crosses to bear.

Playing with my new oven

We didn’t go too far this day. We just did our standard loop around the fields and sit on the bench. It was just nice to blow away some cobwebs after a late NYE!

The extension is still missing the utility room/larder, skirting boards, some doors and a few other bits and pieces…but it’s definitely getting closer

The tiles were laid during a mammoth red wine drinking session – so we may have to do a few touch ups.

To celebrate some ridiculously long marriage of Madeline and Cliff [ 65 years or something – they actually had a letter from the Queen! ] we went out for lunch at The Barn just off the East Lancs. Charlie and I drank wine and I then became a superhero.

We’ve finally got around to building the extension to our house that we’ve always talked about. This extension must be about 12 years in coming. The back of the house was always a mess with quite a pokey kitchen, a rather terrible leaky conservatory and as it happens a rat corpse and faeces infested utility room.

The bit where the pink wall is was the utility room. I was in the garage when I heard a bunch of burly builders screaming like girls and gagging. Turns out there were a couple of rat corpses in the roof space and loads and loads of rat poo. It was pretty disgusting. It always did smell a bit funky in that room now that I think of it.

So now the Steele family must eat their dinner in the garage, or on the living room floor. It’s only temporary…it’s only temporary…it’s only temporary.

Because the kitchen has been wrecked we’ve had to move essential stuff into the wooden floor room. The fridge and microwave are in there. We still have a tiny bit of kitchen left so we still kind of have a cooker and dishwasher and a washing machine. But that’ll be gone soon too…then it will definitely be takeaways!

To cheer ourselves up [ well, me and Oli anyway ] we bought a drone to play with…ahem to document the progress of the build.

So we’ve now got the drains in, poured the concrete, built some walls and got some steel in.

Hopefully this week some more steel will go in and the roof beams will be put in. Weather permitting we may even have a roof on this week!

I’ve been able to solve the Rubik’s Cube for quite a few years and do it every now and then to keep the formula/algorithm/moves/whatever fresh in my head. But recently I happened to be in the room when Emma and Oli were watching Arrow and Felicity Smoak talked about a cube within a cube and then did it on the TV. It was pretty cool. So I looked it up and …

Can’t remember how to do it without looking it up – but I’ll get there

I did it – I finally did it. I solved a Sudoku. I was up early on a Sunday morning. The house was quiet and the news was looping so I decided to have a crack at solving the Sudoku. I tried a few in the past and just got frustrated/stuck/bored but this time I persevered.

So now I can do them quite regularly. Still takes me ages though – even with Emma helping. So now we regularly solve the Guardian crossword, 9 letter word and Sudoku. Getting old!

No idea if I’m spelling names correctly – but we went to Manchester to celebrate the birthday of our ummmmm second cousin once removed, or something.

The Thai food was amazing. My Thai, John Dalton St. Well worth a visit

As a result of all the building work we’re having done I decided to have a massive fire and get rid of some of the crap. When I say massive…it’s been the biggest one yet. It managed to melt the drainpipe on the back of my office. So I’ll have to replace that in the spring time then 🙁

For the first time in an awfully long time I boarded a plane, flew to Croatia and hopped on a 40ft catamaran for a week of “sailing” around the islands of Croatia

I went with Michal and Josh along with a bunch of crazy guys that Michal knew. Much fun was had…

Many beautiful sunsets were observed…

Many crazy things were done…

and many beautiful towns visited

What could be more fun than going into a family member’s Netflix profile and messing with their name and profile pic?

It’s been quite the journey. Laying concrete, getting drunk, building stud walls, getting drunk, putting on a roof, getting drunk. So finally it came to the time to stop drinking [ it helped that Charlie stopped coming around since he now lives in Manchester ] and finish the job.

So I enlisted the services of mini me and did a bit of slave labouring

Some people, cough Dan cough, mock me for my Ryobi tools fetish. But if they’re good enough for the god that is Colin Furze then they’re good enough for me…and apparently Oli.

We made a bit of a shoddy job in places [ this is rather a recurring theme right ] when putting the tongue and groove cladding on. You can see this in the back wall where there is light coming through the planks – you shouldn’t really have light coming through the planks but hey ho – it’s only a shed.

Added a bit of guttering…

Then came the time to make and mount some doors. I went through a few versions of doors and this bit could be a blog post all of its own, but I’m getting a bit bored of blogging about my shed so I’m going to skip over it. I had some 16mm or 18mm [ can’t remember which ] ply laying around so I made use of it. I really should have used something much less thick as these doors weigh a tonne! Especially after putting on my fancy shmancy outsidey bits

If any burglars are considering coming nicking my paint cans and hammock then please don’t smash through my walls / crowbar my doors – you can just unscrew the hinges and you’re in!

Aaron came and hooked me up with electricity for lights and plug sockets and stuff.

And finally we come to the end of the odyssey that has been the shed building mission. I’ve got stuff in there, I’ve added the fascia boards to the front to make it all pretty and I even sealed the end caps onto the guttering, although you can’t see that in this photo.

There’ll be one more blog post on this matter and it will be the costs. Really quite nervous about adding up how much the concrete/timber/electrics have cost in total – especially given that timber shortages have pushed up the prices of everything and I used far too much wood for the job – but we’ll see! It’s still probably cheaper than buying one off the shelf which wouldn’t be anywhere near as sturdy.

My final note….right angles….RIGHT ANGLES!!!

With the stud walls in place I reckon it’s time to put the roof on. I’m taking a central beam with rafters approach. Kinda wish I hadn’t, but ho hum

The rafters are all wonkily in place – seriously, it’s a right mess, but it’s keeping the water out. I ran out of 2×6 so went and bought some more but bought it in brown…because I’m an idiot.

Because way way way back at the beginning I made a mistake and my bricks weren’t laid at exact 90 degree angles everything has been kinda thrown out. This is why there are gaps in my roof. It’s not the end of the world since it’s being felted but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this whole experience it’s that 90 degrees is really really really important.

Usually the sail shade will suffice when it comes to keeping cool and snoozing in the back garden, but sometimes one needs a little extra shade for when the sun is starting to go down and the rays dip beneath the shade and start cooking you. Enter, the side shade

This is the good bit. This is the bit where my garage that was full of wood and has been for quite some time

…begins to empty.

Charlie and I started carrying the wood out of the garage and sawing it into roughly the sizes we wanted and erected some stud walls. We did this for a while and then started doing a bit of drinking. It all got a bit blurry but eventually we ended up with some pretty badly fitting stud walls. The reason they were pretty badly fitting is because I made the mistake of not springing some cash for some new bricks and instead used some that I had in the back garden which ultimately were all different sizes. Because it appears I’m not as good at laying bricks as I thought I was it’s all a bit wobbly. Furthermore, because the day I laid the bricks was really really hot and the concrete still trying to soak up moisture all my mortar went off too quickly which resulted in a bit of a shoddy job…but ho hum – it’s just a shed.

In the picture above you can see that the front left brick has been taken out. This is partly due to the aforementioned shoddy brick laying and partly because Emma looked at it and said “Do you think the red tractor will fit through that hole?”. I measured it, and it would…just. So I took a couple of bricks out to make the hole bigger. It was slightly before this happened that I cracked my head on my old shed doorway and decided this wan’t going to happen on my new shed and made the whole thing taller. Plans, pffffkkkk, fuck that.

Because I made the whole thing taller I decided to add a mezzanine – but that can wait until part 2.