#diy forever

[maeganbobaegan]

I don't know about y'all, but I've got some pretty exciting plans involving a toilet this weekend 🤓

[fairyw1ngs]

U fr can’t tell me shit when I just freshly dyed, glossed, & straightened my hair…newborn baddie

[oh-a-very-toxic-octopus]

Latest bicycle upgrade: actually just maintenance. My Corax hit 500 (p much all off-road) miles yesterday and it felt like time to replace my grotty old chain and cassette. We're doing a long, remote ride at the weekend and I do not want to walk up to 14 miles pushing a bike with a broken chain.

Cassette not actually that horrible, but on the ebike I'm lazy and only really use the central four gears. They're comparatively quite worn. Not too bad tho. I'll keep this as a spare.

The necessary tools. Didn't think to take this until after the install, which is why my new cassette and chain packets are empty. 🙃

Cassette secured so I can undo the central locking nut with this specialised socket.

The cogs DID NOT want to pull off the spline here; in the end I held up the wheel and my partner tapped them off from the far side using the handle of the socket wrench and a mallet. Definitely doable on your own, just fiddly.

My poor mildly dented splines.

Cleaned and greased. Dunno if greasing is standard procedure. We live in a damp country so I prefer to have some kind of protection on anything that might otherwise corrode.

Mounting the new cassette. Just look for the singular broadest spline and line that up with the longest, er, gap on the gears.

Mine didn't want to push fully into place (the final gear is missing in this photo, you may have noticed) so I had to hold the final tiny gear in place while my partner cranked the locking nut on there and compressed everything so it fit. Again, doable solo, easier with two people/3–4 hands.

Torqued to 40Nm. I love these tiny torque settings. Occasionally a car, van, truck or even a motorbike will require >100Nm and I have to bust out the long hollow handle of our tree winch to get the right leverage to deal with it. No such struggle on the MTB.

Anyway. That's the cassette installed. Now on to a bit of jockey wheel maintenance + the new chain.

[oh-a-very-toxic-octopus]

THE ANCIENT ONE LIVES ONCE MORE

They'd discontinued the moulded pump-to-drainpipe hose that runs inside the machine, so we cut it off short of the leak, reattached the drainpipe there, and hurrah. Another decade of dishwashing, please, Ma'am 5040.

[oh-a-very-toxic-octopus]

The final Prison House build post! A follow-up to the gutting, landscaping and redooring posts.

There's a bit more of this build I did solo:

I built out from the original walls and roof with CLS to create space for wiring and insulation and to provide support for what would be my built-in desk.

Then uh got an electrician in, obviously. For the other bits. That require an electrician.

These lights belch out 4000 lumens each, which is pretty important to me as someone who loses her shit if things aren't brightly lit. Yes I use light mode on everything. Come the fuck at me.

I struggled magnificently with soloing anything that remained, not least because everything was heavy/above my head. Jim stepped in to take lead, partly because I'd helped with his office, partly because I was growing violent having to work from the living room sofa, and mostly as a birthday present.

Am I brittle about this? Yes slightly. In my mind, I was gonna finish Prison House myself. But 1) even as "hold this up there" labourer I was still heavily involved and 2) he is fast as fuck and has an incredible eye for detail, so I'm sure the end result worked out prettier than it might have otherwise.

So here's the rest:

The back wall in place! With glue! And then Stormlite so we wouldn't have to plaster! And a ceiling made of pine tongue-and-groove!

I did some painting in the night. Creatively, and unlike everyone else I know, I chose green.

I met several moths during this process, including a massive fox moth.

Left: the windowsill improved with ceiling off-cuts. Right: the desk supports. They're scaffolding poles left over from the time we used scaffolding poles to fence Max's poop field.

We'd stored a piece of worktop for probably eighteen months during the main house build, and finally got to use it now.

Three cuts, two coats of oil and an exceedingly long surge-protected power strip. It's been several months and I'm still in love with the industrial look of those wildly OTT poles and brackets. You can't really see them unless you stoop to look.

Here's the flooring and skirting board going in.

Mistakes were made with the flooring, if I'm honest. In the original post, back when this wasn't going to be a major project and Jim was ultimately going to reclaim it as a motorbike lock-up, you'll see I laid a load of soft matting to cover up the old roughed-up surface. We didn't rip that shit out. Always rip it out. There's compression in the foam still, which means the floor dips a little under pressure, and I think that'll ultimately lead to premature failure, especially as I bought the world's cheapest bargain bucket double-discounted clip-together boards.

Anyway, once that was in, it was time to add the woodburning stove we picked up in this old post.

I picked up some old flue pieces from FB marketplace and then we tried to figure out how the hell to slot it all together, roughing positions with a piece of old pipe.

This was in September, when we should have been done and well onto the final prep for Morocco, so we rushed like hell and I took few progress pics. Therefore not pictured: a lot of cutting, swearing, and buying heat-proof everything to make it all fit together. But it did fit together! I want to find another length of pipe to bring it to the proper height to stop it backdrafting, but as we're into spring now, I've got time.

Everything installed and complete:

[oh-a-very-toxic-octopus]

Prison House phase one.

This is the back of a truck used to transport prisoners. These containers are, understandably, wildly secure, but also quite nice to be inside — they have cavity walls and insulation.

Those first internal pics are actually partway through the process of gutting this thing. Originally it was split into holding stalls. We took those walls out and kept them (they're now part of the canopy in our new truck).

[oh-a-very-toxic-octopus]

The hole. Jim and I dug this together. My project today is to dig a tunnel at the bottom to connect this to the water main under the pedestrian pavement.

The side hole. I banished Max because he kept trying to help. He's pissed.

The drill fits! Process became fairly painless after this — blasted through to the pavement line in about twenty minutes.

Unfortunately it keeps filling up with water from the old leaking in-pipe that we're replacing, but what the fuck ever. We'll just turn the water off and bail it out if it tries to overflow/rise up on the other side of the wall in the kitchen and what am I saying. This is gonna suck. At least it's almost over. The new pipe should massively improve the water pressure in our house, so I'm looking forward to the best celebratory shower of my life.

[oh-a-very-toxic-octopus]

I have to clean out behind my oven today before removing the whole damn wall panel so we can put in a new mains water pipe (we have a leak and the previous owner not only routed the pipe all the way around the back of the house to maximise potential leak points, they then covered that pipe in concrete)

So naturally I'm still in bed at half eight

Eventually I will need to piss so badly I'll have to get up

Until then I am not starting today thank you