In progress

Nothing (as at 1/11/09)  Can’t remember when that was last true.  Time to get skates on.

Still at the musing stage

Building modern life from scratch

This one does sound rather all encompassing, and it could be.  The aim being to see if one could make a relatively modern artifact life a steam engine or a metal clock entirely form raw materials, including building all tools required along the way.  More information here.  Suspect it will take quite a few years of on and off work.  Someone is doing something similar here.

Done

Library

We are decorating a large room at the back of the house, and are planning to make part of it into a proper library, both because Sa and I have always wanted a library that has roof-high shelves with a ladder, and because there are simply far too many books to handle any other way (getting rid of a material amount is not a valid option, as any bibliophile will I’m sure support). Currently, we have a basic idea (very high shelves, back half of the room, movable ladder to access to shelves), and after many many months of indecision have made some progress of how to decorate the rest of the room.  Sketch shown here.  Eventual choice shown here.

Electric gates

I confess that several years after we replaced the gates, it rather escapes me why we bought a gate opener kit.  But, we did, and it has sat in the garage, glaring at me for some while, so I decided it was time to get it installed.  It took three days in total, and it’s nice to now have the gates open open their own rather than having to duck out of the car each time.  The surprising thing to me is that whilst doing it I wondered whether the time spent would ever be recouped,  but, if one spends a couple of minutes a day opening and closing the gates, it only takes 2 years to cover the time taken. Or, putting it another way, since I bought the kit we’ve spent twice as long opening and closing the gates as the time I eventually spent putting the openers in.

Shower room

We have a large shower room, and ever since we bought the house we noted that the flow through the drain is too slow. We got a chance to look at the drain, to discover that it is 6metres long, with no fall at all!  Having played around with the drain orientation, the solution was simple – move the shower across the room.  All it took was a new water feed, new drain, new electrical feed, moving the door in the room, making a new loo surround, rebuilding part of the wall and ceiling, plastering/decorating.  Work of moments   As a bonus with the door moved, we had space to put in a sauna (sits six apparently, though they would have to be both small and very very friendly).

Patio and deck

Our front garden has been a mess since we bought the house in 2003. We have made slow progress in between times, and particularly in removing a vast amount of Ground Elder. We were determined to finish it off properly, with a nice patio and some where to sit. I don’t really recall why I thought it was a good idea to do it myself since it is neither fun nor something I can do better than an average tradesman (my normal criteria). Sa thinks it’s because I’m tight, and she may be right . Anyway, after endless delays due to rain it’s all done, and looks pretty good (we think). We’ve also now done the deck that goes on the end. We chose Ipe (a hardwood), and it looks pretty superb, though it was a lot of effort over what a pine deck would have taken.  And, a year on, it all stills looks great.

Renewing the central heating system

When we bought the house it had a boiler out of the ark. Well, the late 70’s anyway. The time had come for it to be replaced, and that provided a perfect opportunity to redesign the system to be more functional, and to incorporate the currently separated system that heats the pool into a single system. Lots of work to identify the best system – Interestingly, after much work to look at using solar heating for the pool, the economics just didn’t stack up well. But, using a heat pump looks much much more promising.

In the end we did this so that we could put a heat-pump in when we renew the pool piping, so went with a single condensing gas boiler for everything. All worked very well, and a big improvement on the old system.

Invisible sub-woofer

After several years, I finally decided that I absolutely didn’t like the look of our old sub-woofer (a Celestion S10), and also suspected that it was fairly third-rate in terms of sound. That started a simple search for a better looking replacement, and (though I don’t recall quite why), I decided to try and hide it altogether. This seemed to fit with an Infinite Baffle speaker (see here for more details) which is also supposed to give the cleanest sound with the lowest range. More info on progress on this thread on the AV Forum, the final construction blog post here, and calibration here.  Flat response to 13Hz – wow!

Hydroponic greenhouse

A couple of years ago we visited a hydroponic centre whilst on a trip to see Chris Rix in Inchnadamph Lodge in the north of Scotland. We were pretty impressed and thought to might be fun to do at home. We experimented with a plastic greenhouse, and got good enough results to want to do it properly, so have now put up a 10×6 proper greenhouse.

I’ve just finished the flood and drain hydroponic system – made slightly more complex since there is no mains power in the greenhouse. We could put mains in, but we have a couple of old 12v batteries from a mobility scooter that ought to be big enough to power the requisite pumps for months, so it feels more fun to see if we can use them. I’ve adapted a two-channel digital mains timer to provide the control (see here), and have a small boating bilge pump to shunt the water around.

Replacing ballustrades with stainless and glass ones designed like a suspension bridge

This post says it all one this one.  This was part of a larger remodelling of our hall to make it much more light and airy by taking out a small gallery that went around the top, but didn’t form any useful purpose.