Saturday Shenanigans

The wood is here!

With the finalised measurements, checked, checked again and rechecked, I finally went to Atkinsons to get the wood for the window frame this morning. While I was there, I also got the boards for the top of the long bench under the window – 27 of them, at 365 x 150 x 19, treated fence boards. And the nice surprise at the end was it cost me about half what I thought it would. Can’t complain about that!

As an aside, if you want to ensure your measurements are correct, draw a 2-dimensional picture of the frame on paper (or the computer if you are clever like that – I’m not, so paper has to suffice). Write the length of the longest part; then draw in the uprights. Underneath each upright, write the thickness of the piece – in the case of my window frame, the longest piece is 4085mm and the upright measurements read 44 + 19 + 19 + 44 + 19 + 19 + 44 – that’s three heavy duty uprights and four thinner ones (two each side of centre). Then mark in the width of the ‘holes’, the spaces there the glass will go: 646mm x 6 (as there are six window spaces). When these are all added together, they come to 4084, because it is pretty much impossible to divide the 1mm remainder in half! But 1mm is not going to be much of a problem in the grand scheme of things. Anyway, if anyone adds them up and comes to a different answer, please keep it to yourself, as the wood is now cut!

Getting home was fun; the two longer planks wouldn’t fit in the car – well, they are over 4m long! So we had them sticking out of the passenger window. I was glad to get home without mishap.

After a quick bite to eat, I went out again to get the bitumenised corrugated sheets for making the compost bins. Each sheet is 2000mm long and I got four of them. Two of them will need cutting in half; I only need three half sheets, but it isn’t possible to buy 1.5 sheets in the shop! I was quite looking forward to putting the bin together and installing it in its permanent site – but I had under estimated the amount of preparation work needing to be done.

The bin is going to be a double bin (ie, two compartments) so I fill one, then while using that, I fill the other. It is going to stand against the end wall of the garage. Last time I really looked at that area, there were just some old bits and pieces to move – large pieces of wood, and some clear plastic corrugated sheeting (I intend to use that as a ‘lid’ for the compost bin). All I needed to do – or so I thought – was move the heap, dig out the area to make sure it was reasonably flat, then put the bin together and put in place. How naïve was I? while I wasn't looking, the whole area has become overgrown with nettles and I certainly don’t remember all those brambles!

OH and I therefore spent the latter half of the afternoon clearing nettles, 

brambles - pulling up some hefty roots in the process, 

old bits of wood, concrete breeze blocks 

and some shaped wall capping stones that are original to the house – not sure where the wall was that they used to cap, though.

The only casualty was me - somehow I can't seem to pull up nettles without getting stung. Ouch! 

I pull the nettles by hand rather than cutting them down with the shears, because that usually pulls up some of the root too and weakens the plant. It also doesn't leave any green part behind that can feed the root and restart into growth.

Altogether there were four capstones, two concrete blocks, half a dozen huge pieces of wood (some so rotten they fell apart when dropped) and several pieces of plastic sheeting.

And that doesn't account for all the nettles and the massive bramble roots we dug out.

Anyway, the first part of the job (clearing the space) is almost complete. 

The next stage is to ensure the roots are all out, that the area is relatively flat and then the bin can be constructed and placed.