Time is a tricky thing
Time is a tricky thing, not having enough of it means that one has to find time.
I had a dozen jobs to do this week but a late night at work on Monday, plus a Tuesday and Thursday with my daughter meant that I only had the Wednesday to swing at the jobs I needed doing.
Apart from the house there was also housework, washing, cooking and pressing issue of catching up on some PPI claims I’d made, well a new bathtub won’t pay for itself will it. I knew that it was a pretty fruitless exercise – I’m a pretty methodical person and I know I’ve never opted for it – but I’d had so many loans and credit cards over the years there was always a chance that one might bear fruit. Anyway this meant lots of paperwork and as well as finishing off the floor I now needed to find time to stuff around 20 envelopes with lots of documents to firms that were about to abandon my claim as I’d not supplied this or that that they’d asked for. No time to do it but hey there’s an hour or so I can tweeze out on Tuesday to do the dirty deed, so envelopes and doc’s to hand and some frenetic stuffing later they were all ready to go.
Another little job that needed doing was to provide some photos of glamourous Glenville that a finance company needed to prove it was worth a loan. Now I know it’s worth the ticket price but unfortunately the house was covered in dust, floors were still up and on a whole it looked a little unworthy of the money they were asking for. No problem though, rooms would be tidied – well bits of them would be – piles of tools would be moved and camera in hand, photos would be taken. Actually on reflection the pictures did a fair job of representing what had been done and nothing had really been exaggerated, but whatever the outcome the process took valuable hours of my shrivelling time remaining.
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These are the images I sent to the finance firm – would you lend me the money?
Still that floor needed finishing, there were a couple of jobs to do and on Wednesday those jobs were finally put to rest… well 99.9% of them were at least.
First I had to secure some wire mesh on the inside of the underfloor air vent. Not really a job that needed doing as there was already mesh on the outside of the air vent but I do like a bit of belt and braces and I felt it needed doing. A bit of work later and a fine bit of backup vermin deterrent was in place.
The last job was to cap the floor over the air vent. This meant lining the hole with double sided DPC (damp proof course) tape then sticking DPC to it, while deliberately leaving a bit of sticky exposed where the hole lid would fit down onto the hole mouth.
The lid then had to be constructed, a bit of plywood that had been jigsawed out of the main sheet had to be covered with a square of DPC double sided tape, a square of insulation board was cut to fit the orifice and the entire hatch was then covered with DPC.
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Once this was all done it could then be screwed snugly into position the exposed sticky on the frame and on the lid forming a perfect seal, the multiple screwings pulling them firmly together.
So what was the 0.01% of the job that wasn’t done?
Well when I screwed the insulation to the board with some drywall screws the screws had poked through a smidgen on the outer side of the lid, they needed to be grinded down. So angle grinder to hand I found a disc I’d not used in the past, it was a little wider than other discs I’d used and seemed to catch a bit on the disc guard, but hey it would soon free up on spinning up.
For some reason I cannot explain I locked the grinder switch to on and then plugged it in. What the buggery was I thinking? As the current hit the angle grinder it tried to spin the disc up, the disc however was firmly lodged. I watched the grinder bucking a bit and transfixed by what was going on I didn’t initially notice the smoke seeping out of the grinder. Suddenly the penny dropped and quickly I unplugged the grinder from the mains.
The damage however was done, a night of hard good work and the final seconds of the job and I’d written off my trusty angle grinder. Buggerations.
Screw heads still all proud, ungrinded and pointy and only 99.9% of the job done.
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Even my trip to work and back takes about two hours of my day…