Baby 24-year-old me on my first full-size bike, a CBR500R, the day I brought it home.
I miss roadbiking hugely rn. We live on a trunk road through a stunning part of Wales and there's an endless stream of cool sports bikes zipping past my window in the summer heat. It's impossible not to look back on that little Honda and want something like that again. One of these would be a good replacement:
I think about this often.
And then I have to think about blowing all my savings on the mortgage when it renews in November this year.
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.
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).
Following on from gutting Prison House, here's the initial external work. Jim's mum and brother built that little outdoor area for me and it is lovely to this day.
I planned to use that cladding a little differently (using longer lengths and a basic running bond) but we were out of time at this point. The roofing was a lucky find — leftover stock.
Again, probably should've gone a lil longer on those and added guttering. Something to sort eventually.
