Halloween the night of the dead angle grinder
The weekend was another of those weekends when I only managed to find a single day – and a bit – to work on the house.
Still the house’s loss was my gain as I had my lovely daughter for the entire day all to myself and it was Halloween too. We spent our time well, some of it at my folks or in the cinema sharing popcorn and nachos while watching Hotel Transylvania II and later at a Halloween disco/party in Winston Village Hall where I got wrapped up in toilet rolls as part of a Mummy party game, very funny. Then off home to watch Dr. Who and multiple Marceline the Vampire Queen episodes in an Adventure Time Marceline marathon, before putting my little skeleton girl to bed.
So not a bad day at all.
I did manage to get the Friday afternoon off work the day before this Halloween excursion though.
One of my large tick sheet items was to upgrade my electricity meter to a smart meter, this was a free upgrade and in my haste to get jobs ticked off this tick sheet I’d phoned Eon and enquired about a smart meter upgrade. This could be done they said, it could be done quickly too, but only if you could get time off on Friday to meet the engineers, otherwise it could be some time.
So I booked Friday afternoon off, I’d not planned this but it was such a good job to get jobbed that it was worth the unplanned half day sacrifice.
Anyway everything went to plan and within ten minutes of arriving home the chaps from Eon arrived. Half an hour later the meter was fitted and I was monitoring my energy use on nifty little meter. Y’know, it’s quite amazing how much energy a lightbulb uses, I never knew.
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Anyway just after they’d gone the electrician I’d spoken to turned up. What a nice guy, he’d told me he’d not be able to visit this Friday but he’d pulled out all the stops and managed to find the time to come over. We had a tour around the house and we established that a lot of the work could be done by my good self and once it was done then he’d be happy to come over and complete the second fix.
So two big jobs done.
It’s hard to remember what I did for the rest of that evening, I think I was in a bit of a fug and very tired from work. I remember starting some washing but I think a lot of the time was spent on the couch being quite the lazy boy. You may find that hard to believe, but hey, we’re not all perfect.
Anyway the Saturday was spent Halloweening and my next spirited work occupied my full Sunday.
It was a day of rest but unfortunately I had to work and it was back to the tools with a vengeance, I got up early and it was straight into chasing out routes for cables in the family room. I may have said last week that I’d gotten all the nasty jobs out of the way but this was really an awful job. I’d killed my angle grinder the other week and I was now using one I’d borrowed from my Dad. It was really generous of him to lend it to me but I don’t know what it was about the tool but I really didn’t like it. I think I must have been spoiled by my DeWalt but this one just felt dangerous, I don’t know if it was the awkward positioning of the guard or the way it ran but I just didn’t like it or trust it at all.
Couple this with it being a dirty job to do, check out the video below, this only – literally – goes half way to illustrate the dust and mess, as my phone battery ran out just before it got really dusty. It really wasn’t something I particularly liked to do, also during the visit from the electrician we’d established that there was some extra cabling that now needed to be done and would need further wiring and chasing. It would even involve lifting a panel I’d fixed permanently and then lifted and replaced around four times now.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkmEBpdwpxw[/embedyt]
I think this video’s rather funny, I only wish I’d caught the bit where you couldn’t see me at all and then I’d opened the doors to let out the dust. It’s all a bit Keystone Cops at this speed but it captures how dusty it gets… and it gets worse.
Anyway half way into the day and my borrowed grinder packed in. It has been threatening to do this all morning and on several occasions it had already refused to restart until it had cooled down. Around lunchtime it just packed in.
Resplendent in rather dusty togs it was a trip to Screwfix to buy another angle grinder. The staff there mostly seem to know me by now and are quite happy to put up with my moaning while shedding liberal amounts of plaster onto their nice tidy shop floor, they’re pretty good like that. So tale of angle grinder woe unburdened and new Bosch grinder in my car I then headed back to the hills. They’re all pretty groovy in the Bishop Auckland branch 🙂
Getting back I decided that I had to do a bit more chasing before I could treat myself to lunch, so I needed my trusty stone cutting blade from the broken grinder. I struggled and struggled to get the thing out and even after wellying it with a mallet it still wouldn’t release, so another trip to Screwfix? Not likely, I didn’t have the time, so another disc was found, not as good as the one welded to my Dad’s old grinder but a stone cutter nonetheless, slower progress but progress without a half hour trip to Screwfix.
Anyway that was my day, angle grinding followed by tunnelling out the channels with a hammer and chisel, then burying further into the wall with the chisel and then fitting the back boxes. When things got naughty it was out with the SDS drill resplendent with the chisel bit, very powerful but a bit uncontrollable, things got a bit ermmmm untidy.
This took most of the day, looking back on what I’d done it was amazing to think that the work had taken hours and hours to complete. Sure there were some other jobs to do, filling in some holes with that Cementone filler, lifting that panel and adding some cabling, chasing in the Laddomat cable, sure there was a lot to do but it was really hard to be impressed by the completed work at the end of the day.
By the death it was kicking on for ten in the evening, I then had a late flurry of work and managed to get my washing put away, smartened up the kitchen and brushed the thick of the dust and rubble up in the family room before a late evening meal and a bath. Boy was I grubby when I finished, hopefully this is now the end of the major messy work and I can get on with some filling and decorating next.
Hang on…. I hate decorating 🙂 isn’t it really wet.