August

A month seems to have vanished since the last post so I thought it was about time I checked in. I’ve mostly been being a parent, and it’s pretty likely it will take several days just to jot down a few sentences between trying to entertain, feed, clean, and generally run around after a baby.

(First break due to waking up with an attack of hiccups!)

I actually squeezed in a tiny amount of DIY last weekend. Top of the list have been a few outdoor jobs to make the most of the weather, and minimise any disruption on what counts as a routine. Don’t think the hammer drill was popular there, especially after it turned out one of the holes wasn’t quite where it should have been. In my defense, I did measure everything; I just didn’t take in to account how wonky the house was! Still need to finish off putting the new house number up… in the right place… sometime!

(Burping duty!)

Wifey very kindly got me a new gadget this month too. I hate reading documents on computer monitors, so I’m definitely looking forward to the e ink experience instead. I’m rather mystified by the idea of a screen saver given the screen, but since it has one I now have a personalised baby calendar, which is nice. Much quieter than the real thing! Mind you, getting time to read anything might be tricky- I still haven’t finished Stasiland in traditional book form, which I started before I was a dad! In case of miracles, I already have a couple of free books, some epub Redbooks, and a guide to creating epub books on there.

(Trying to convince sleeping baby to sleep.)

(It’s asleep! Collapsing in a heap!)

I’ll be avoiding DRM content on principle, except maybe books from the library, which could be very handy for children’s stories! So far I’ve found a couple of tools which look promising for grabbing web sites for offline reading later:

• calibre
• dotEPUB

I’m also tempted to try and convert my old internal blog to epub since Blog Central got archived, although I seriously doubt I’ll actually get around to that!

(Cleanup to aisle two!)

Well that was a longer gap than expected (a couple of days) partly due to preparing for a customer briefing as well as baby duties. That did give me the chance to do a bit more with calibre: as an experiment I created a simple eBook for presentation notes just by converting a .odt file to epub. The conversion worked really well without any effort, and it was quite useful to highlight things I needed to remember, and make notes before and after the presentation. Could be something I’ll do again in the future.

(It’s asleep again! Food break!)

The other reason for the lack of any posts recently is that they would have mainly been rants! I expect there’ll be plenty more rants in the future though, so don’t panic :)

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Waiting for deliveries

Luckily the carpet arrived before the occupant:

No more decorating for a while. Woo hoo! (But probably no more sleep for a while soon either. Boo hoo!)

After and before

Despite the distractions of an impending baby, we’ve also been making a bit of progress on the house lately. Most of the major work is done (I hope!) so it should just be decorating from now on.

The war on leaks is going well and after ripping out the old toilet last year, the new cloakroom is almost done:

An even bigger milestone was finally finishing the front bedroom. I don’t think we have a before shot for this room because it was just too horrible!

From start to finish it took about 14 months to complete! That was partly due to getting other rooms done at the same time, but there were a few minor complications along the way: the floor needed a bit of work, someone stole part of the wall and, just when all that was fixed, even more holes were required to install a cable for the new boiler! I do hope we don’t need any extra holes now the carpet is down!

I guess it’s probably time to get cracking on the nursery…

The old carpet has gone already and, fortunately, it looks like the floor is mostly ok! Which is lucky really: we don’t have 14 months to finish this room! Maybe not even 14 days!

Escape hatch!

This weekend I finally finished filling in the unwanted extra ventilation we had installed earlier in the year:

I think that’s the most woodwork I’ve done since school! I’m sure it’ll look better after a coat of paint.

(Unfortunately there is a very full airing cupboard on the other side so it isn’t actually a very good escape hatch.)

DIY SOS

Last Friday was definitely the best day at work for a while: I wasn’t in the office, or anywhere near a computer!

Last year IBM celebrated it’s 100th anniversary with a celebration of service, and this year they donated 1000 hours to the Jubilee Hour book of service. Twelve of us spent a few of those hours volunteering for the Society of St James on a DIY SOS day:

Fortunately they seemed pleased with our painting skills and we managed to paint the communal corridors in one of their units of self contained flats. It’s amazing how much you can get painted in a day with that many people. Unfortunately, while there was time to start on the fences outside, I wasn’t able to con anyone in to coming home and finishing off my house!!

Thanks to Matthew Comer for organising the day and the photographic evidence.

Floor show

Another quick floor related update- if only doing the work was as quick! Despite the best efforts of the pipes to get completely in the way, there’s a now a new bit of floor in the house…

I even stood on it without ending up downstairs in the kitchen! It took a little longer to fit than expected due to the cunning B&Q cutting service plan not quite working out as well as I hoped. Luckily the new piece of chipboard was too big to start with!!

As if to prove a point, the original leak has got worse, so will definitely need to get that fixed soon. At least there’s a floor to put the drip tray on in the mean time!

Who moved my floor?

As if by magic, a hole appeared…

For bonus points, all the pipes survived and, even better, that’s not blood on the radiator!

Tomorrow I will mostly be aching.

New boards please

So looking through my big book of DIY I had an idea for a completely new style of DIY book. The books I’ve seen all have illustrations or photos of someone confidently performing some task with exactly the right tools, and no chaos or clutter. Either I’m the odd one out or this version of reality is somewhat unrealistic. My new, “Accurately Illustrated Guide to DIY” will instead have illustrations of someone looking confused or throwing tools at the wall, and photos of battered pieces of wood nailed crookedly to a wall… through a pipe.

In chapter one I’ll be explaining how not to go about fixing floorboards damaged by a leaking radiator.

Helpfully there are plenty of other pipes just underneath to provide an excellent opportunity for disaster.

Any suggestions or material for future chapters gratefully received. That and any sensible tips for repairing floors!

The year of DIY SOS

First of all,

Happy New Year!

Now that all that Christmas nonsense is out of the way it’s time to attempt to get back to writing posts a bit more regularly. Before anyone gets too excited that is likely to mean a lot of rambling on about fixing up our new house; 2011 was the marathon house buying year but 2012 is going to be a whole Olympiad of jobs that need doing on the house of many leaks!

Given the number of leaks we already have, one job that I’m not planning to do myself is replacing the bathroom. We’re still trying to figure out the best way to fit everything in without everything looking odd or squashed. My pencil and paper scribbles have evolved into a highly realistic 3D rendering quick 3D sketch in Second Life to see what it might look like. Apart from our bathroom looking extremely small when dropped in the middle of a field on its own, it was a very simple way to get a rough visualisation.

I haven’t quite managed to use bathroom sketches as an excuse to buy a Galaxy Note… yet… maybe if it was just a little bit cheaper!

The other project I keep contemplating is whether to put in some structured wiring. While decorating and pulling up floors would seem like the perfect opportunity. Unfortunately there’s no obvious place to put a so called ‘node zero’. I guess I could put a patch panel in the loft and defer choosing the final location until later. Would that work? And is there an easy trick for running cables behind dot and dab dry lined walls? Using 8 or 16 pair cable seemed like it might make things simpler than pulling through multiple cables, but that doesn’t seem particularly easy to get hold of in the UK. There’s a good chance decorating will just overtake any ideas about installing ethernet cables but I haven’t completely given up the idea.

Next job: sanding.

Explaining the auto kitchen light plan

Since a few people seem interested/skeptical on Twitter, here’s a very quick explanation of a small update to the kitchen lights. Since getting a Current Cost meter it’s been obvious that the biggest waste of electricity are the halogen spotlights in the kitchen. (It amazes me that ordinary incandescent light bulbs are being phased out while at the same time many new houses are full of halogen bulbs, but that’s for a future post!)

Most of the time the two lights under the cupboards would be good enough, but the switch for those is a bit hidden away, so we usually use the five ceiling lights instead. The first part of the cunning kitchen light plan is to connect the two worktop lights to a Home Easy remote control ceiling switch. Now we could put an ordinary remote switch in easy reach next to the main light switch but where’s the fun in that? I got tentative spousal approval to use an indoor PIR remote control instead…

Results so far seem promising: the lights aren’t triggered walking past the kitchen because the sensor is looking inwards from above the existing light switch, and there’s often no need to resort to the manual switch to turn on the electricity burning main lights… which is actually quite lucky because they aren’t there at the moment!

Only temporarily removed due to some planned ceiling painting* but it was a good excuse to automate the backup lights.

* Well, it seemed pointless painting the tiny ceiling in the porch on it’s own, so the kitchen is getting a fresh coat as well.