Tag Archives: varnishing landing

Wednesday 8th April 2015 – GUESS WHO HAS BEEN A BUSY BOY THEN?

Yes, I’ve accomplished a lot today. It’s really been keeping me out of mischief.

I was up early too for a change. When the alarm went off, I was eating my breakfast. I must have been keen.

varnishing landing floor les guis virlet puy de dome franceFirst job was to varnish the floor and the stairs with the third coat of varnish. I gave it a good wallop and it was all over by 10:30. All it needed to do was to dry and set thoroughly – that’s usually about 48 hours. And then I can fit the skirting.

While that was drying, I went outside and had a look around at what jobs that I can be doing. First job was to start on the compost bin. But I didn’t last long on that as I remembered something else quite important to do.

new wheels summer tyres ford transit caliburn les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd doesn’t Caliburn look nice with his new clean wheels?

Yes, I needed to change his winter tyres and fit the summer tyres. Of course, I have two sets of wheels so I really just change the wheels. And because they have been outside for 4 months, they were pretty grubby and so I gave them a really good clean and polish.

One or two of them have come up really well too, but I’m thinking that I might give all of the wheels a good clean, scrub and coat of paint over the summer. I’ll add that to the thousand other jobs.

Another job that I wanted to do was to fix the guttering on the house. This involved assembling the ladder now that I’ve recovered both the parts, but on my way up to the scaffolding I noticed that I hadn’t painted part of the fascia board where I couldn’t reach off the scaffolding. This meant that I had to reposition the ladder, and then I could deal with that.

While I was waiting for that to dry, I started to cut the lengths of wood that I needed to start to make the compost bin (which was where I started) but in a search for something or other, I started to tidy up the downhill lean-to. And I made some progress too, much to my surprise.

fascia board guttering les guis virlet puy de dome france After lunch, I put the second coat on the fascia board and then started to reassemble the guttering.

I’ve repositioned it slightly because in the past, it drained down to the roof of the verandah and into the water tanks there. Now, I’m having drop onto the roof of the lean-to at the other side, because it’s there that i’ll be digging the hole for the subterranean water tank.

It took a while to do that because I had to work out the levels and cut a few lengths to size. I did as much as I could (I need to check it in the rain and make sure that it works like it should before I glue it together) but when I went to move the ladder round to the side of the house to fix the downpipe, I noticed that it was already 19:20

Doesn’t time fly quickly when you are enjoying yourelf? That was enough for me and I called it a day. I’d earned my rest.

Tuesday 7th April 2015 – THE WIND FINALLY DROPPED THIS EVENING.

That made quite a change as we’ve had non-stop wind for the last three days or so.

All kinds of records have been broken too with the wind. For example, of all the wind energy created by the big AIR 403 wibd turbine since I reset the meter in December, 40% of it came today. And with the small wind turbine, today has doubled the previous record of wind generated.

It really was impressive but now it’s blown out and we are all quiet.

This morning, I took decisive action and ripped out all of the masking and protection on the stairs and on the landing downstairs. I gave the stairs and landing a thorough clean, sanded all of the imperfections, vacuumed it thoroughly and then gave it all a really good coat of varnish.

That took about an hour and a half in total, and so for the rest of the morning I went outside. First job was to sort out a huge pile of old cardboard that I had put on one side when I tidied the barn out the other day.

cardboard cover raised beds les guis virlet puy de dome franceWith all of that, I went down to the raised beds in the garden where I grow my crops of vegetables. Nothing is going to be done there this year, so I’ve covered over all of the beds with cardboard. I did 6 this morning, and then this afternoon I dismantled the bean frames and did the rest.

I’ve only weeded two of them, the rest can take their chance. BUt it’s not going to be a problem for as soon as it rains and the cardboard becomes waterlogged, it’ll fold down flat onto the soil in the raised beds, suffocate the weeds and then slowly disintegrate into the soil over the period of the coming year.

Immediately after lunch, I put the second coat of varnish on, and I’ll do the third coat first thing in the morning.

For tea tonight I made a mega-mushroom and potato curry. Mushrooms were cheap at the weekend and I had some potatoes left over from winter.

And there was so much surplus energy today that the water in the dump load (the home-made 12-volt immersion heater) went off the scale – ie over 70°C. I had some lovely hot wahing-up water this evening.