And Ive finished my work contract so it seems that Im free now for a couple of months over the summer... I know that sounds great to everyone but it also means that ill have no income and lots of spare time... And that spells financial trouble for me since it seems that the only way I know how to fill spare time is with projects!, and all my projects always cost lots of money :)
Oh well, as I said, I dont expect to get any sympathy at all from anyone, and its only a couple of months.
Besides, there are plenty of projects to do at home since the house has been rather neglected for a couple of years while I was traveling in the summer and well, its pretty hard to do anything outside in the winter here with all the rain.
So, the first and largest project was to rebuild the stairs along one side of the house... They were just a jumbled pile of bricks and concrete paving slabs when I originally bought the house, so about a year after that I rebuilt them in the form of a more organised and neatly stacked pile of bricks and slabs... But they moved around and settled and needed constant nudging back into line. So after a decade or so I'd had enough and now Ive done a more solid job of rebuilding... They are still made of bricks and slabs but they are now 90cm wide instead of 60cm and they are now built on a concrete substrate... I hand mixed about 30 bags of concrete mix and rebuilt them one step at a time over about two weeks... Its not perfect but the stairs are now wide and solid and should last for at least a couple of decades :)
Next project was to build a trellis for a grape-vine that I planted in the front yard a couple of years ago. Its kind of a dividing fence between mine and the neighbours property (should let the low angle sunlight through to the front yard in the winter though when the vine has no leaves).... More hand concrete mixing for the post footings and then just some 6mm galvanized cable for the vine to hang its-self over.
And now Im working away on another wood work project. This time its a night-stand for the bedroom. I saw a slab of maple burl at a wood shop a few months ago and decided to use it as a small table top. But the burl had several big voids in it that I wasn't sure how Id fill. So I bought the lump of wood and have been thinking about how to work with it over the last few months... And Ive decided what Im doing and have got to work on it... I decided to fill the voids with clear epoxy and an aggregate of yellow/brown chunks of crushed glass. Its taken a couple of weeks of steady little epoxy sessions to get it done but the table-top is now basically complete and looks like this...
Now I just need to build the rest of the night-stand to go with it :)
And I also finally got around to replacing the ugly old metal floor vents in the house with some flush fitting ones that I made myself from spare sections of floor boards that were left over from when I installed the hardwood floors a few years ago... It was lots of effort to drill all the holes but I quite like the end result :)
The new flush wooden vent and the old metal vent.
And another "finally" project is that I got a decent vice for my garage projects, but there isn't really space for a suitable work-bench, so I built a concrete pedestal for it that should work pretty well.
And that about wraps up my projects so far... On with the summer break :)
