The bottom of this little camping stool had lost it’s feet so would have scrapped up our decking or just sunk into the mud – then my brother had the idea of using bottle caps on the feet. They fitted just right but if they hadn’t then some hot melt glue or sugru would have worked.

During our house refurbishment we obviously had to have new flooring put in. I wont bore you with the details here but we were getting conflicting advice from just about everybody – the carpet fitters (who where brilliant!), the builders, friends dads who are builders and my family (not to mention the actual landlady/aunt-in-law!).

I really wish I had had access to this site then – I didn’t understand half the terminology, had no idea what you could get and was frankly so tired out with everything (having been flooded out the previous year! and being a nomade) I just couldn’t wait to get back in.

It explains what things mean and tells you why a job needs to be done a certain way!  Which jobs you can do yourself and which are really only for the professionals!

They even have a question and answer section on their blog 🙂

They are http://www.fitted-carpets.co.uk/index.html and they also have a twitter presence which is floorblogger.

Purely as a resource to learn about different types of carpets and the materials that go into them – this is a brilliant site 🙂

Jean’s new bed a.k.a. my cousins old bed arrived – Al bought it back from London with him in the van and then we had to face the task of getting it into the little box room. It was decided that the only way was through the window – so Dad and Al with Jean supervising proceeded to be the ‘chuckle brothers’ and managed to get the bed in!

Here is my bed protector and my sole contribution to this whole thing! Yes I know its a piece of card board but it was needed to stop the bed being wripped apart by the catch on the window.

Of course this ment a slight rearrange of Jean’s room including the toy chest being moved – I really should finish painting it – it was one of my nan’s old ottamen.

Jean and Daddy then put the winni the pooh bed spread onto Jean’s very own Dovet which was entertaining to watch!

Jean then just had to try her bed out – she’s decided its a princess bed as it has a pink plush headboard!

The Sunday night was her first night and there were not the pitta patta of feet that we were expecting but instead there was a flomp sound – Jean had fallen out of bed but was still a sleep and only woke when I put her back in the bed. Later on there was an even softer flomp (mainly as I’d put the arm chairs cuosins beside the bed) – this time there was a little cone of dovet with a wide eyed Jean head sticking out the top looking around solomy in the dark. I tucked her in over by the wall – she didn’t fall out any more – nor in the subsequent nights which is good – but feeling a bit stupid that I hadn’t realised she would fall out :/

(this post originally appeared on our personal blog Wed 29th Apr 2009)

My good friend and colleague Andy came over to stay for a while, which meant I had ‘entertaining a guest’ as an excuse to do some of the fun stuff I’ve wanted to do for ages.

So we finished making the welding bench! I’d made the top and gotten part way through cutting the legs to length, so we finished cutting them and welded them in place, then welded extra flat strips around the bottom to make it reasonably rigid. It’s all just tack welds, and it’ll almost certainly need some diagonal struts added, but it stands upright and is surprisingly sturdy; I’m going to experiment with it a bit to see just how many more struts it needs. I’d also like to drill holes so I can mount my vice on it, too.

Then we cleared a space and moved my electronics workbench down into the workshop! This is great news, as it clears up space in the office (albeit revealing the piles of junk that were lurking beneath the bench), means all my tools are in one place (which is most convenient, as things were always in the wrong places), and creates more storage space in the little garage, meaning less stuff on the floor.

I’ve since reincarnated my power distribution rail, which I had when we lived in Ealing, but haven’t used since; the idea being that it’d be good to do my electronics experiments on the end of a dedicated [[Wikipedia:Residual-current device|RCD]] so I don’t trip the one in the house. It also splits the output into four circuits, each with a six amp circuit breaker (the smallest I could obtain easily).

I still need to get rid of a lot of waste cardboard that’s sitting around, and we’re still looking after Seth’s motorbike, and there’s still junk to be sorted – many things need to be elsewhere; the little garage isn’t a place to store things we only use a few times a year, as we have the Big Yellow for that!

Although the lighting’s not really good enough when I’m explaining the power rail, here’s a quick video tour:

For my next trick, I’ll stop procrastinating by building infrastructure, and get on with actually making myself a digital watch with an embedded ARM processor and colour dot-matrix LCD. Watch this space.

(this post originally appeared on our personal blog on Tue 5th May 2009)

Moat people know about climbing plants potentially being bad for the stone or brick work on a house as the roots dig their way in opening up fractures but I have another tail of woe.

We have a clematis – a climbing plant on the garage/electronics workshop and I noticed it was getting near to the phone cable so I asked the landladies gardener to cut it back for us – as I had visions of it tearing the line out of the wall!

She then promptly gut straight through the phone line – as we both work from home via broadband internet this was bad news – and it got worse. This is a chargable repair on BT’s part but they were very quick in responding and sorting the whole thing out and they even had to put a special junction box on as there was not enough cable slack to splice it back together again!

It did feel very much like one of those Greek tragedies – in trying to prevent the cable being damaged I made sure it was damaged :/

Sarah feels the cold keenly, while I can usually just put on some more warm clothes to deal with British winters. But even I was finding it hard to work in my home office when the temperature went below ten Celcius; fingerless gloves still let me type, but numb fingers increase my error rate, and the pain is distracting.

Part of the problem was that our house is draughty. There were a lot of gaps in the window and door frames, through which daylight could be seen; when it was windy and rainy at the same time, the wind blew rain in through the frame of the large window in my office.

So step one was to fix these. The large office window, it turns out, is somewhat curved, so when my brother in law was visiting, we screwed extra handles to it, pulled it properly closed with levers wedged in the handles, then did up the bolts at top and bottom to force it to stay in shape, which fixed a large source of draughts.

Then I want around a few other choice places, adding draught excluder strips where I could.

Next challenge was to increase the heat. We had only one real source of heat in the house, a wood/coal burning stove at one end of the house. Since it’s a long thin house, this was little help for me in my office, right at the opposite end – but it didn’t even make enough heat to keep Sarah happy sitting next to it, so she would often use the expensive electric fan heater to keep her temperature up, much to my concern (for if we can’t pay the electricity bill, things will quickly become rather unpleasant).

Now, the grate in this fire was rather small compared to the size of the fire itself. The grate had only sides and a front, so had to be pushed back against the firebricks in order to not spill coal out. This meant that air coming in through the vents would tend to rise over the fire and up the chimney, taking heat away without imparting much oxygen to it. Even then, it would slowly wriggle forwards over time, spilling ash and coal down behind, until it came too far forwards for the ash shovel to be pushed underneath it, meaning the fire would choke itself. But as it moved forward, the effective volume fire increased, with a notable improvement in the heat output – even though the fire at the back would be starved of air from beneath, as it sat on a bed of ashes.

While rummaging through piles of random bits of metal lurking about the place from when we moved in, though, I found an iron grating that I suspected might be able to fit in behind the existing grate, enlarging it. Sure enough, it did – and it fitted so perfectly well that I suspect it was actually meant for it. Suddenly it was possible to have a large bed of coal in the fire, with air coming in through the vents from underneath it and being drawn up through; this led to an awesome increase in heat. However, it led back to the same old problem – we now didn’t have room to get the ash shovel in underneath to take ash away. And so the fire would slowly choke itself with ash.

So I ordered two metres of 25mm square hot-rolled mild steel from Hindleys, my favourite home-engineering supply house. When it arrived I used my angle grinder to chop off two lengths of the stuff, then used them as spacers on either side of the grate to lift it up an extra inch.

And now the fire’s awesome. I can easily get it so hot that it becomes mildly terrifying, an angry yellow glow emanating from the air vents as it roars away, the radiated heat unpleasant to be too near. A few days ago, it actually melted the plastic crates we store our newspaper and kindling in, purely by radiation.

But it’s still rather cold in my office.

So we decided to spend some money on the problem, as it was in danger of harming my work. I went down to John Stayte Services, a local purveyor of awesome things. We buy our coal from them, but they also sell propane, butane, related accessories such as heaters and Sievert torches, workwear, and animal feed. To my delight, they had a deal on; a shipment of gas heaters had been damaged due to the shipping container being broken into by illegal immigrants who built a home on top of them for the duration of the voyage… so they were selling a slightly dented heater, along with a cylinder of butane, for £89 when normally a heater alone would cost more than that (and a gas cylinder £50 or so as an initial outlay).

I set it up in my office, lit it… and over the next few hours, the temperature rose from ten degrees to about twenty, with me correspondingly shedding layers of clothing. Since then I’ve been running the heater on low power, and the temperature’s stayed around seventeen degrees; with the stones of the building having been warmed up, it’s now not taking much heat to keep it nice and warm.

And so, I can proudly state, for the first time since we moved in, it’s actually warm enough at home that we are turning down heat sources so as not to be too hot!

(this post was first sent live on our personal blog in December)

2010 will hopefully see a rise is all those lovely DIY projects we love so much! And hopefully a decrease in the vehicle “panic” maintenance i.e. when it brakes down and you have to attempt a repair!

This blog is being set up in conjunction with the other Salaric blogs, Salaric Art and Craft, Salaric Wildlife and Gardening and Salaric Cooking and Entertaining. Living in a 600 year old cottage in the cotswolds we tend to have a lot of DIY projects and running on a budget that is really far to low to cope we often have to fix our own vehicles and the like too! This blog seemed like a natural extention to the family of blogs especially as we were flooded in the 2007 Great Gloucestershire Floods – it was in 2008 when our home started to be put back together again thankfully by the insurance that the idea of a DIY blog came into beign – why it took us so long to get round to starting it I can not say other than we had a year of dodgy internets after moving back in and many and varied adventures on the way!

Still he we are at the beginning of the shiny new 2010 and we hope to produce a nice useful and sometimes funny blog to help with all you out there who are “doing it for themselves!”