Wednesday 2 November 2011

Out of the garden and back into the media room

Sometime around April, in a fit of excitement and enthusiasm, I moved stuff out of what will be the media room (to be filled with consoles and gadgets) in preparation for getting it looking good.  Or more realistically getting it looking like it has been decorated in the last twenty years, not much we can do just yet about the two types of carpet that decorate the floor.


But, just as I was about to start sugar-soaping the walls and filling the manifold cracks and holes, spring hit the garden like a dose of growth hormones and I was forced to spend what seems to have been the entire summer outside nervously grappling powertools and hateful brambles.  The media room has languished, bare and unused apart from Ula’s frequent flings onto the beanbag.


During that period it has loomed large in my guilty conscience, and as a result the apparent work has grown ever bigger as I procrastinate or forget to get the tools and just get on with it.


Well, no more.  Islay forced me to pick up bucket and sponge and sugar soap the walls.  And last week, as another preparatory job, I attempted to mount the projector screen on the ceiling, so I’d get a chance to make mistakes and still get time to correct them before painting.


And make mistakes is exactly what I did.  Like some carefree oil firm It took 10 or so exploratory drillings before I struck the solid bedrock of the ceiling joists.  Then it took two attempts to get the brackets mounted so that they lined up squarely and accepted the screen.  And finally it took a few minutes to realise that our skewiff house means that the ceiling joists are not perpendicular to the walls, and so the screen is slightly off square.  Bah.


I’m going to see how it looks, but I can already tell that even if the lack of alignment is not that noticeable in practice, it will nag at me until I do something about it.  And I don’t really know what to do about it, that seems like one step too far for my cack-handed DIY skills.

Tuesday 1 November 2011





With an ever-increasing pile of hedge trimmings, pruned roses and lopped branches, I thought it time to take a match and lay waste to the waste.


Success.  I singed my hair, got the neighbour’s fence smoking (but not actually burning) and reduced all the clippings to a circle of pleasing white ash.  And I managed to disappear the two bookcases we dragged out of the media room some months ago.