Lazy morning watching the eclipse
Took another long week and had a lazy morning watching the eclipse.
Some advice to me should I need to ever prepare for another eclipse:
- Prepare for the eclipse this time!!!!
- Buy the proper shades well in advance before they become as rare as hen’s teeth
- Four pairs of good sunglasses (I used three) work well but BE CAREFUL (don’t take this advice if you’re not me, this is personal advice to someone who’s a bit reckless about self-preservation)
- A still pond or a large tub of water filled to the brim– on a still day – work well to reflect the sun. The best results are obtained in looking into deep still lakes on eclipse days. The tub I had got wavy and was no good on this eclipse, but its’ worth a go.
- Lots of coffee and a nice comfy chair, you’ll be there a long time, the eclipse takes over an hour from start to end
- Research cameras and filters for eclipses
- Have a radio – switch off the radio should it intrude into the eclipse experience
- Find somewhere quiet
- Chase the weather if you have the opportunity, a cloudy day means no eclipse
- Find somewhere where there’s post-eclipse partying, it felt a bit of an anti-climax after it had happened and the TV was full of astronomy professors getting squiffy
- Find somewhere with a 100% eclipse or it just will not get dark and you’ll miss out on the full eclipse experience
- YOU HAVE BEEN TOLD MR. FUTURE ME
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Anyway it wasn’t till the afternoon that I started making any dints on the DIY.
So Friday afternoon started where I’d left off with trying to route the plastic hot water pipes to the radiator positions in the large bedroom.
The last attempt had been a disaster, I’d exhausted myself trying to thread the piping through holes drilled in the joists around corners and through more joists to the far end of a long bedroom. Half way through during the previous weekend I’d given up and now I was starting over.
The plan this time was to be more meticulous about drilling in straight lines and hopefully with more care and attention it would go a bit easier. I had inspected building reg’s and I was drilling at almost the maximum size allowable for the joists, so enlarging the holes wasn’t an option. Anyway the first job involved filling up the holes I had done previously with dowels and glue, I thought this was sensible and it only took around half an hour to do all the holes, so it was well worth it.
Anyway meticulous measuring and drilling ensued and once the lined up holes were all anti-burred I started pulling the pipe. Things went a bit easier but after going round the bend into the bedroom (almost literally) it all went pear-shaped again and while huffing, puffing, pulling and pushing I managed to kink the pipe at the start and end of the run. This was not good as kinks are just about impossibly un-kinkable, I’m sure the hot water down the pipe trick would work but I wasn’t risking my entire install on such hocus pocus, I would start again.
A bit of time on Google and after trawling through the usual pile of plumbers condescending replies to kinking problems…. yes I must be an idiot for being able to kink plastic piping, tsk… I found that it wasn’t uncommon to put a joint into the middle of a long run of piping, especially where there was a tight corner.
Returning to the job in hand I elected to put a joint into the corridor just as the pipe headed into the bedroom. A ninety degree elbow would do the job and if placed it in the corridor it would be accessible until eventually (ages from now) I got around to redoing the corridor floor. I would then drag the pipe from the bedroom radiator location to the joint and in turn drag it through from the radiator manifold. The joint would overcome a nasty change in direction for the piping that had challenged me and made a lot of sense in hindsight with the information I now possessed from the patronising plumbing forums.
A little bit of huffing and puffing later, no kinking and hey presto it all fell into place, I terminated the manifold end and left the bare pipe proud in the bedroom ready for the radiator legs.
Job done.
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I was on a roll now and wanting to make up for lost time I was quickly onto the job of lagging the pipes, so bread knife (my preferred lagging cutting tool) in hand I quickly transformed my nice slim white plastic tubes into grey puffy insulated pipe runs.
Once this was done I did a bit of woodwork and raised some joists that had left sadly lacking in the height department once I’d removed the fireplace. This didn’t take long but needed to be done.
After this it was only a matter of insulating the void under the floorboards, so with my dust mask in place and my knee pads fitted I crawled up and down the joists rolling down two layers of 100mm insulation.
Once this was all done I could get on with the first bits of boarding out. The idea behind this whole exercise was to raise the lower half of the room to match that of the higher end of the room and luckily – as it turned out – the difference between these floors was an even 12mm across a straight partition point that once represented the break between two separate rooms – but I’ve gone through this before.
So board out the lower part of the room with 12mm structural spruce and either leave bare joists in the upper part of the room or board between the joists, this boarding being flush with the upper surface of the joist. I personally preferred the latter idea, even though it would take much longer it meant that when I finally laid the wooden floor I wouldn’t have to worry about the boards being evenly supported along their full lengths. It meant too that un-tongue and grooved boards would be supported over joist gaps and boards wouldn’t have to end on a joist.
Anyway by the end of the day I managed to get two sheets of spruce down and I retired knowing that I could have done more but the eclipse had been worth seeing and it was justified. I wish I could have had a glass of wine to celebrate but an afternoon of power tools and inebriation wouldn’t have been a good idea.
Saturday, had a lovely day at my folks with my little girl, sister and bro-in-law who were over for the weekend, washed down with a trip to Aston’s birthday party on the afternoon. Aston was celebrating his fifth birthday and the usual mayhem involved with birthday parties ensued.
Children running amok
Children’s’ entertainer trying to control children running amok
Aston belting out the Frozen theme with the energy and emotion that belied his few years
My little girl getting thumped by one of her friends and spoiling the day for her and for me too.
So with some regret tinged some relief I got back on with the job in hand on Sunday.
I boarded up some of the holes trying to avoid the challenge of “what to do about the radiator” arose once I’d run out of holes to fill with spruce. I knew I had to eventually make a decision of what I was going to do, so once I’d ran out of holes to fill…
This was the plan:
- The radiator was going to be fixed into place, there was to be no lift out panels this time, the floorboards dictated this, they’d have to be meticulously laid, joined, sanded, oiled/waxed/varnished etc. they were not coming up in a hurry.
- I would check the jointing of the pipework but basically once it was checked then it would have to be sealed up under the new floorboards.
- I would have to make sure that there were no leaks before I finally laid the main floor boarding.
This was the execution:
- I put down the sheets of spruce onto which the radiator would stand
- I measured out where the radiator would be located and marked up where the fixings would go (I drilled pilot holes into the spruce) and the location of where the chrome leg pipes would enter the spruce and in turn drilled out large holes for these too.
- I lifted the spruce boards after carefully marking their positions to one another.
- I fitted a block of wood to the back of the board where one set of fixings would be fitted to re-inforce the radiator’s supporting bolts and I then fixed a block to the side of a joist where the pilot drill holes had narrowly entered, this would hopefully support the bolts as they clipped the side of the joist and would in turn support the radiator.
- I then measured where the plastic piping should end – using a handy template I’d made earlier – I cut the pipes to size and fitted a Conex elbow to each of the pipes and the chrome legs to the other end of the elbow.
- I then carefully lowered the spruce boards back into their marked positions so the chrome legs sat proud through the holes I’d drilled for them. This took some negotiating, I could have done with a second pair of hands but it’s amazing what one can do with a long stick with a screw in the end of it.
- Job’s a good un… or so I hope as chrome joints are notorious in plumbing for leaking.
Anyway I’d managed to finish the flooring in the lower section of the room, it had meant attaching a runner to the side of the first of the higher joists but it hadn’t been too much trouble. This all had been time consuming but basically now all the groundwork was done to getting the floor level again.
Another hour of tidying, moving timber, sorting out tools and that was the end of another weekend. Lot of work but again not that much to show for it….
I did get some nice pictures of the eclipse though.