Riders Of The Storm

A week has passed, and I have another picture of my DIY efforts to bring to show and tell.

Yes my friends, I finally got around to doing one of the doors.

My efforts started on Saturday. The revelation that a total of 7mm of wood needed to be removed from both height and width of the door resulted in me taking one look at the hand plane, thinking "bugger that", and getting myself hence to a DIY outlet to buy an electric planer.

Homebase were all out of planers. This was a sod, because the previous day I had been to another branch of Homebase whilst visiting my brother and had there forced myself not to buy a planer, on account of proving that I did have willpower and could walk into such a store without buying a power tool. ANYWAY. Bought a Black & Decker one, which it turned out did not do everything it said on the tin. For it to do everything it said on the tin, you needed to buy an 'optional extra'. So took it back and got the Focus own brand, which was a little better and 20odd quid cheaper.

So I planed the necessary height and width off the door, and all was fine and good. Then the next problem was the thing that I'd thought the B&D planer would do but wouldn't without extra expenditure, and which the Focus own planer would do but not to as much of an extent as the B&D planer was supposed to. I had to cut a rebate into the bottom of the door. For those of you who are not familiar with this terminology I can't figure out how to explain it right now so someone will have to find me a handy DIY link that explains it. Suffice it to say that I got all peed off with it and left it for the day.

Sunday was a family meet-up in Bedford, it having been Mum's birthday in the week. As this was a bit of a breather from doing the doors, perhaps I'll take a bit of a breather from talking about the doors also and go through some of the other things that happened in the week.

Well, Alison went away. Then Alison came home again, a short time before my sanity disappeared completely. Hugs and kisses were involved and my sanity came back again. Although it then retreated again as I got to grips with reading Vitals by Greg Bear. Fucking freaky book that is. Nasty conspiracies and stuff in it. By Saturday I was reading through it as quickly as possible because I just wanted to get to the end. It's good, but it freaked me. Greg Bear has a tendency to do that, because of his grasp of scale and the way he makes you believe that what's happening really is Earth-shattering (literally, in some cases). I'm now reading Origin by Stephen Baxter. He's beginning to show similar freak-happy tendencies, seeing as both Time and Space (the first two books in the series Origin finishes) freaked me out in one way or another. It'd be nice to think that someday I'll write a book that gets the sense of scale spot on and freaks both of them out, LOL.

On Friday, as I mentioned in passing, I visited Bro. This was the first time we'd seen each other since Christmas, so I got to see his new toy (GameCube) for the first time. Naturally, I got my ass whupped at Mario Kart. But fair's fair, because I'm sure I'd whup his ass at Crash Nitro Kart. I also had a go on Star Wars: Bounty Hunter and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The second was OK but neither were particularly inspiring. I'll stick to KOTOR if you don't mind. Then we headed out to Toys R Us, and Homebase (which is Toys R Us for grownups). I managed to resist temptation to buy either of the three versions of Optimus Prime in Toys R Us, and also (as already stated) to buy an electric planer in Homebase. Bro, on the other hand, was unable to resist a Felling Axe over the more middle ground choice of a more, well, mid-sized axe. Of course, I was persuading him that the Felling Axe was the only sensible choice to make. And before you start wondering, they have a wood fire, and they often go scrumping for wood.

There may have been other things of note but they obviously weren't that noteable because otherwise I'd have mentioned them.

Which brings us back to Sunday, in Bedford. We ate at the tried and tested restaurant that we've eaten in there every visit for goodness knows how long but which we may not be eating at in future due to a petty dispute about the bill. Afterwards we wandered into the town centre, as also seems to be the tried and tested thing to do. No disputes here, just expenditure. Smiths had a 3 DVDs for �20 offer. I forget what Mum got, but Bro and I both got High Fidelity and xXx, he also got Sliding Doors, I also got Coyote Ugly. Heh. I also got a late Christmas present from my parents (which hadn't arrived in time to have at Christmas) of the Lord of the Rings soundtrack boxed set.

And back to the door. Yesterday was when I did the rest of the work towards the above picture. A couple of saws, a chisel, and some patience ("yeeeeaaaaah, just a little patience...") sorted out the rebate problem, at which point the door actually fit the hole. This was an amazing turn up (I'd expected it to need more fine tuning at that point) and I then had to take the step of actually sorting out the hinges. This is possibly the most stressful point, as it's where it's mostly likely you'll fuck it up (unless you're really enthusiastic when planing it down to size). The hinges have to be lined up exactly with the hinge recesses on the door frame. So you have to chisel out the recesses on the door fairly precisely. It takes quite some time. The problem with this bit is I've already shown you the end result, so you know it turned out ok. Anyway, once you've chiselled out the hinges it's just a case of screwing the damn things on and finding out how good a job you made of it. Turns out I did pretty well. It opens and closes, doesn't swing closed or swing open, and also looks pretty damn funky (see above). Fitting the Yale lock gave me a good excuse to buy more drills (needs a 32mm hole through the door).

Deciding between us what colour to stain it is going to take a bit longer than fitting it, it would seem...