Firstly, I'm trying out a "drop cap" style graphic at the head of each article that'll allow you to tell which blog the repost came from when it's announced on social media. If you find this annoying let me know, but give it a few days to see how it goes...
Today should have been a shed day. Wife is having a sleep-in, the cats are all sprawled around waiting for me to go there (aka Bloke & Blokey Cats' Heaven) but my back's all locked-up which means all exertion will quickly get painful - I'd rather not.
So instead, I'm sitting on the couch with my feet up, Pickle purring himself to sleep on the next seat, Archie and George waiting on the back path in case any local wildlife decides to drop into the yard and break a leg so they can catch it and parade it around the house.
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| Yeah, with his blanket... |
And I've got my keyboard, mouse (O my Cheezburger! Hoomin sed mouse!) - and a long list of stuff I want to get done on blogs, graphics, and research. Go take a look at https://ohaicorona.com/teds-news-stand see what I'm up to.
I've developed a bit of love for Paint.NET, NightCafe, BlueGriffon, and what I can achieve with them, and I'll probably get back to adding my own graphics to blog articles again. The Zorganite Encumber is finally getting a direction to develop into, and our politicians, corporations, landbastards, and cartels are giving me plenty of ammo for armchair activism. Oh and Barnaby. How rich a vein of risible observations is he? Scummo's valedictory came close, especially the bit where he modestly didn't say much about how much of everyone else's jobs he had to do for them. Spudton came close with his lack of grasp on some hard cold facts and he was caught out on them time after time after time after ... well, you get the idea.
My back's still aching but it's more comfortable sitting here than trying to lift timber into place so as to be able to finally finish the custom rack shelving and maybe start moving everything into it so I can get on with the NEXT stage.
Quick Shed Recap.
The new owner and landlord replaced my 3x3 shed and existing 4x5 'garage' (I say this with no regret, that 'garage' originally here was unusable since the doors were rusted shut and it was filled with builder's rubble in lieu of a floor so I just built storage into it and it kept *most* of the rain off so there's that) with a new 6x6 garage but the process left us with a one year or longer hiatus between taking the old down and handing over the new. So stuff was in temporary and makeshift places for a longish while.
(6m x6m is about 20' x 20' for anyone still not using metric)
The in mid-August last year, the new garage finally went up. I have a first photo from the 12th when the shell was up and the concrete hadn't yet been poured (that happened by the 16th) then a week later, it was finished!
Only . . . The landlord was using it to store construction tools and materials for the rear house he was refurbishing after having it relocated from its old location; and to build THEIR shed inside out of the weather, and also went on several holidays, so: patience Grasshopper...
My first photo of "my" garage - i.e. this time with my first few benches and power tool tables in it - was on the 4th of November. Not kidding, just shy of three months of having a shed but not having a shed...
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| Yay - sort of... |
The workbench and the store shelving came with the garage - the landlord was most kind, had them in storage from one of the many businesses and ventures he owns, and had them put in for me, and as you'll see, extremely useful.
I might as well say it - this is one of very few times I'll mention the shed in this blog because it's more to do with all my PTEC3D / RCX things so you'll find most of the info over there on the PTEC3D Blog. And only because I'm trying to paint a picture of the overall situation.
So my first order of business was how to make two areas (the original small shed and garage) fit into the new space. I've always liked the small cheap pressed-tin shelving units most hardware stores sell, but this was going to be a bit of a beast of a different nature. Firstly, I needed to definitely leave room for my wife's mobility scooter - and possibly the car as well - but I also needed to squash 9sqm of workspace and storage combined and almost 20sqm of storage space, plus two vehicles in needed, into 36sqm.
Tin shelving was NOT going to cut it...
Hardware stores also sell 1.8m x 1.8m x 0.52m type garage shelving, but with a suitable unit costing around $300 and actually needing twice as much, I needed to cheap out, geek out, and reach deep.
The rack shelving came out of a) the four aluminium posts of a heavy duty flatpack (in a manner of speaking, if you can call something that came in a large 2m x .9m. x .6m carton that needed two to lift, a flatpack...) gazebo, four posts from the old cat fence that we'd built and then elected to take down rather than have scrapped, and a bunch of pallets, several lengths of old 70x35 structural pine that had been used to build the outdoor kitchen, and a lot of sweat and cursing.
(You'll also see that the store shelving on the back wall was already getting good use as I put hardware there for the job, plus stored a bunch of stuff temporarily while I built it a new home.)
In the bottom picture you can see a brownish cloth hanging up. It was getting hot, and the garage featured a 50cm wide, wall-to-wall, skylight which was great for seeing what you were doing but added about 4C - 6C to the temperature inside when the weather warmed up. So that curtain on the western side kept the worst of the sun out in the afternoons.
Anyway - that rack shelving is 4m long, 0.85m deep, and 1.8m tall,almost 9 cubic metres (because the top shelf can be loaded almost to the ceiling) and solid enough for me to walk along. Every level requires me to cut pallets to 85cm but I tried a layout on the floor using full-depth pallets and it was great if I wanted to store industrial equipment but would have been impossible to reach to the back of shelves, and also, taken away almost a square metre of floor space, which is also at a bit of a premium if I wanted to be able to bring the car in during really bad weather or to work on it.
The shading got taken care of by what turned out to be a two-day job (in the 38C - 42C heat) of recutting, attaching rails to, and moving the canvas to cover the central section and making two shadecloth sliding blinds to give me a way to manage heat and light.
The shelving has since gone up by putting a top shelf on as you can see above, and the second of the planned three shelves installed at a height suitable for lifting awkward heavy things into. The planned third shelf will be up higher and not have the space for larger tubs, and thus be more suitable for sheet material and small organiser tubs.
There's a lot more happened since these photos which is why I'm okay with sharing these early ones here. Head for PTEC3D Blog to see more of the shed that's also a bit more up-to-date (and also has other posts relating to plastic recycling, electronics, and so forth) and let me leave you with this thought: the donations I receive don't go to lining my pockets with unimaginable wealth. They currently don't cover the costs of the hardware I use to create projects - and (sort of) document them.
In fact, I still have to pay most of the of blog and server online fees out of pocket. You'd be helping a lot if you used the donation facilities down just below here and made a donation - preferably a recurring monthly one - for about the price of a cup of coffee.
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