… during the night and was having such an exciting time that I was determined to remember every second of it when I awoke.

Of course, you can guess what happened. I awoke and … paff … it was gone.

Ahhh well.

So this morning after something of a slow start (I’m not quite sure why I couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm) I cracked on. And much to my surprise, by the time that I had knocked off for lunch, I had really accomplished something.

and here you are – my first ever home-made chest of drawers.

Don’t worry about the front panels by the way, they will be replaced eventually with pine planks when I have finished the wardrobe and know what offcuts that I might have left over. And they will pass in front of the wardrobe frame too, in order to hide the framework which isn’t quite straight.

Making the sides was exciting though. I had to make the first one and fit the runners in position by trial and error. And to my surprise, I only ended up 14mm out in height. And that was soon remedied with an offcut and from the outside, you would never notice.

The second side was of course so much easier, having already made the first and having taken copious notes.

The gap in between the two sides needed to be 549mm and to my total astonishment, having assembled the framework back in 2010 or 2011 or whenever, and doing it by guesswork, I had left a gap of 548mm. And what is 1mm betweem friends?

After lunch I fitted the top to the chest of drawers, fitted one of the sides of the wardrobe above the chest of drawers, and cut and shaped the piece for the back where the mirror will be. It’s all becoming quite exciting here as I progress.

But two things stick in my mind and one of them is annoying me intensely. I’ve designed the wardrobe so that the internal fitting is 500mm, meaning that I can use 500mm pine boards without having to cut them. However, the flaming, blasted, perishing 500mm pine boards are actually 505mm, meaning that I have to trim 5mm off each board.

This is a total shambles, I’ll tell you that. If there were anywhere else to go other than Brico Depot, I’d be there.

But the second thing that I have to say is based on the first thing, and this is definitely positive. That is that despite the hanging cloud that has covered us for all of the day, I’ve used the 650-watt circular saw intermittently today and you would never ever notice from the state of the batteries. Installing these new, big heavy-duty batteries back at the end of autumn was an excellent move. those old second-hand batteries would never have coped with this.

For tea tonight, I made an exciting vegan aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit. I’ve lost a load of supplies, including the macedoine vegetables and the kidney beans. I’ve no idea where these might have gone but its bewildering. I’ve had to use subsititutes and it doesn’t taste the same.

But where have these supplies gone to then? This is bizarre.