Snell-Pym

As part of my tireless service to the village of Cranham, I'm now a member of the Cranham Village Hall Committee (and so a trustee of a second charity!)

This has its perks. In particular, when they renovated the hall, a big thick solid shelf was torn out, and I saved it from the skip to put it in my workshop. It's a bit battered, so not very pretty, but as a workshop shelf it'll only get more scarred, so that's fine.

After some trials and tribulations, I managed to mount it on the wall:

Mainly, I had to cut gaps in the brackets to let them fit over the black power conduit (while maintaining their structural integrity), despite the conduit being level with the wall but not level with the shelf, as the line of the blockwork in the wall is not level with respect to gravity. No surprise when you consider that the building had shifted somewhat since it was built.

So, for the record, despite the shelf looking quite wonky, it's level:

I also had the choice of 75mm or 50mm screws. 50mm screws would have only protruded about a centimetre into the wall, which would not bode well, while the 75mm screws had a good centimetre spare, so I cut little blocks of wood and ran 75mm screws through them, then through the brackets, then into the wall. There's something really satisfying about screwing a long, thick (6mm), screw tightly into a fresh, virgin, wall plug.

The 50mm screws were perfect for screwing the horizontals of the brackets to the undersides of the shelf, mind.

Finally, I mounted a strip of angle iron under the shelf, for clipping my set of clamps to:

Much nicer than having them languishing in a bag...

As an exercise in her art class, Sarah made some pictures by cutting out shapes in coloured paper:

Coincidentally, at about this time, I was thinking that I ought to screw a bit of wood to the wall in my workshop and hang tools from it to make them more accessible, and to store them more compactly than having them sitting on a shelf (which is the worst way of using a shelf EVER). So I was delighted when Sarah announced that she'd thought her pictures could be stuck to a piece of wood to make me a toolboard...

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In our house, the telephone sockets are downstairs, at one end of the building, while my office (where my office telephone and computers sit) is upstairs and at the opposite end of the building.

So to get working quickly amongst the hubbub of moving in, I ran Ethernet and telephone cables from the phone sockets (the ADSL router that provides our Internet connection sits rights by the phone sockets, since the DSL signal quality is so bad anyway I wanted to maximise signal strength by not putting the ADSL router on the end of a cheap telephone extension cable) up to the office. The longest Ethernet cables I had were ten metres long, so I put the core router in the airing cupboard, more or less exactly between the phone sockets and my desk, and also conveniently having a power outlet to run it - then ran a ten-metre cable to it from the ADSL router and another one from my desk.

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They say bad things come in threes - well here's todays three:

Number one - we where moving the fridge freezer in from the little garage and due to dad accidently ending up taking all the load there is now a little set of half moon scuff marks where the bracket on the bottom of the appliance cut into the lino My poor new floor :'( Poor dad was mortified and thought he'd ruined my entire life - I am currently trying to work out if I can fix this disastor.

Number Two - once the fridge freezer was in place we begain to assemble the Ladder racks unit that we had there pre-flood - it has little adjustible feet - bad was trying to get the thing to stand level when my mum phoned with some suggestions on what to do with the lino - Dad accidently snaped the foot off of the ladder racks - but as loads of rust poured out of the thing this was hardly suprising. To say he was unhappy at this point would be putting it lightly.

Number three - in going to to see how dad was as he'd slunk off to make a replacement foot out of some off cuts of wood - obviously not adjustible, I managed to step on a thin metal tac which went right through the sole of my trainer and into the sole of my foot when the next second I trod on a small stone that forced it up into the rubber sole making it impossible to remove. Foot hurting and a pair of shoes rendured useless - you could say we are having a good day here today.

We're back in our house! We just spent the first night back in it...

We've got upstairs cleaned out enough to move back in, but downstairs is still a pile of bags and boxes and furniture, waiting for us to put the furniture into place so we can unload all the stuff onto it.