… to the sound of heavy rainstorm cannoning off the roof, the barn, the windows and just about everything else in the vicinity (this sounds like a rather good blues song, although I haven’t had the blues since I started taking the Prozac). That was at the usual time of 08:00 this morning.
Even though I’m working inside, it’s still not the kind of weather that you really want to wake up to so I turned over and went back to sleep.
At 09:10, the next time that I surfaced, it had stopped raining so I decided to raise myself from the dead. And this was the view from my window.
You’ve heard me talk about the hanging clouds that sometimes hover right over the mountain. Well, this is one and it was a good one. 7.5mm of rain we had, and badger all electricity (although not absolute zero like a few weeks ago).
On a different topic I do recall saying to my loved one that I would never let her down. But since I’ve moved into my attic, it’s just as well that I remember to let her down every morning as I seem to be attracting a stream of visitors coming to inspect my living quarters. Today, Liz came round after her French lesson to see what I was up to. She even brought some vegan ginger cake with her, left over from Saturday’s chantier. It’s nice to have visitors round even if it means that Randy Raquel has to be deflated every morning.
She’s the second one of that ilk that I have had. The first one – we were having a discussion about Uganda when I accidentally bit her. She … errr … broke wind and flew off out of the window. I went to the local edition of Ann Summers to get a replacement.
“Do you want a normal one or a Muslim one?”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“You don’t need a foot pump with the Muslim ones. They blow themselves up“
Today I fitted the beam in the floor. It took ages as you need to very carefully make the lets in the existing beams so that the new beam is a tight fit. It takes ages to drill out the lets, chisel them to slightly undersize and then file them to perfection. Then cut the beam to slightly oversize, file it down to perfection and then whallop it into the lets with a huge sledgehammer. Finally drill through the original beams into the new beams with a 3mm drill and then whack a pile of 5×200 nails in through the drill holes to hold everything in place.
And I know why the beams that I fitted in the attic floor were too long and too deep – the one that I fitted in the floor today is too shallow and not quite long enough. How on earth did I manage to do that? And I still can’t find the missing beam. How do you lose a beam that is 4m x 20cms x 6cms?
Tomorrow I’ll be cutting and fitting the verticals. I need four of those but I can only do two of them as I don’t know where the other two will be until I start to fit the stairs in.
And in other news, I had the pompiers round selling calendars. The one I bought is an organiser-type that gives you a space to write appointments in. It also gives the Saints’ Days, and I see that my birthday is the day of St Modeste. Now how appropriate is that? My overwhelming modesty had always let me down – if it wasn’t for that I would be absolutely perfect.
Measure twice cut once, but make sure your ruler isn’t carp first. The metal retractable ones with the wobbly end stop are often as much as half a centimeter out.
Yes, but what it looks like is that I did all of the measuring and the cutting, and then fitted the wrong beams in the wrong place.
So now you have spare timber and need more beams? You could stick the short ones in the ground and see if they grow any longer :p
Measure twice, cut one and then fit it before going on to do the next… or invent a marking system so that the right bit goes in the right hole :-))
LOL I’m quite into marking, and that’s how I built the verandah – each piece cut and labelled. In fact, I did the workbench in the barn like that too.