Started getting busy again
So I’ve started getting busy again, spent a bit of cash and did a bit of work.
Work was long overdue, I’d been pretty lazy, or pretty side-tracked or just having trouble keeping my head above all the parties, weddings, visits and a variety of bad-luckedness that’s been heaped on me recently.
Anyway this was the weekend the worm was to turn so I started early on getting things done again.
Money still being a problem I manoeuvred around my credit cards on Thursday evening, found one with a bit of spare cash and made a list of all the jobs I was going to tackle over the next couple of weeks. Having traced out a plan of action I headed to the Screwfix website and booked in a bunch of purchases to collect on Friday lunchtime.
Screwfix is great for tools and the like but not so great on materials so rather than book a collection I knew that the local B&Q superstore was just across the way from it and I could to get my materials there before the Screwfix run.
Friday lunchtime and only an hour, ten minutes to get there and ten minutes back, it was going to be tight.
Sporting a three piece suit I headed into B&Q first through the trade entrance. I’m not the most builder looking bloke in the world and the suit didn’t help, you could feel the people on the trade counter dying to tell me that I’d used the wrong entrance, but hey was that just me looking for an angle on this blog entry to make it interesting.
Anyway I still have a rather dodgy ankle and was happy to find a shopping trolley to offer up some zimmer like support.
Quickly I headed over to the trade section and loaded up with pre-mix mortar, bonding plaster and finishing plaster, 75Kg in total. Heading back and I noticed they were selling 73mm bricks, by the brick. Ignoring my already straining trolley I loaded it up with 25 bricks and spent the rest of the trip buying buckets and weed killer.
Back at the checkout a rather dusty man in a three piece suit presented the stunned (yeah really) trade counter man with his trade card. “Cor blimey I never thought a gentleman like you would be in the trade” he exclaimed.
Well actually in reality they barely raised an eyebrow, I got back with my straining trolley, realised I’d forgotten something and left the trolley. On getting back I found that the helpful chap on the counter had decanted my trolley contents onto a flat truck instead and all was well in B&Q land.
I got this all back to my spanking new posh car, I unloaded a set of three pink curtains I had prepared earlier and carefully put the contents of the truck, brick-by-brick and bag by dusty bag into the back of it.
Speedily headed for Screwfix, collected my collection, quickly dumped into back of car and back to work with not a moment to lose.
Anyway all was prepared for a busy weekend… apart from the fact I was looking after my daughter all day Saturday, which was lovely and wonderful but doesn’t get my bedrooms plastered.
So with the fact in mind that I only had a day to work I retired early, got a good night’s sleep and got up early to tackle some nasty jobs.
The first, well it shouldn’t have taken as long as it did but it did, the first was to brick up the void left in a chimney breast where I’d recently knocked out a thirties tiles fireplace. Now this should have taken at most an hour but as I had never bricked up anything in my life then it took a lot longer. I was actually nervous doing it, my rationale was that if I couldn’t do this then how the heck was I going to tackle some of the more difficult jobs I would be up against in the future.
Anyway YouTube is a wonderful thing, half an hour of surfing and watching and I was prepared to do my best. The ready-mix mortar mixed and off I went, my recently acquired bricklayer’s trowel in hand. I started my first row (the window left by the fireplace only took one and a half bricks) chopping a brick to size with a bolster chisel and a lot of luck – the rest weren’t so successful. The next row wasn’t so good as the mortar was falling into the brick holes, a quick Google and I found ready-mix was too sandy and would do this, either add lime or bung up the holes with toilet roll. Well I didn’t have any lime but I did have a lot of toiler roll, so….
Anyway I quickly learned that my mortar was a bit dry and found out how to get better purchase by making it a bit sloppier. I found too that brick cutting wasn’t as easy to do as my first attempt and I did have a bit of spoilage, however my bricklaying wasn’t bad. I actually feel that my attempt was as good if not better than the one the professionals had done bricking up the fireplace in the other room. I wouldn’t say that it was perfect, it certainly wouldn’t have done for an external wall, but as it’s going to be covered in plaster soon it wasn’t bad at all. Actually there was a pro’ on YouTube who was demonstrating how to seal up a fireplace, a rather cocky sexist foul mouthed blokey, I reckon my brickwork was a dozen times better than his stack of bricks, he didn’t even cross them to gain some stability, what a……
Anyway that job jobbed I went on to work on the garden. The trees that had been felled months ago had decided to have a go at growing again. Some of the trees were now reaching around four feet in height, sprouting side branches at an alarming rate. What should have been a job I tackled the moment the trees were felled turned into an afternoon of work. First me and my lopper lopped off all the branches on the trees all around the building, a bit of tidying and then out with my new Makita drill. Again a circuit of the garden drilling holes in the tree stumps and then off to the kitchen to mix up the stump killer. A 20:80 mix of Roundup Stump Killer to Water, a little bucket, a brush and an eyedropper affair and off I went around the garden again. Basically a healthy coat of the mixture painted onto the stump then a quick suck up of fluid into the dropper that was dispensed into the holes I’d made earlier with the drill.
Surprisingly these two jobs took most of the day.
I was left some time to do my washing and a bit of tidying.
After this I settled down with my notebook and watched the “Mastering Plastering” DVD, a quick bath and then a nice steak (donated by my lovely parents) at 10:30pm while watching “Family Guy” and off to bed to read a book.
It doesn’t sound much but it was a very healthy amount to get done in one day.