Hanging A Large Oak Door

Yesterday I hung a 3'3" wide oak door delivered by the joiner.

 I think this is the widest single door I've hung. But there's a 3'5" one to do yet.

It's nice to work with some oak again as we seem to be using lots of sapele lately - which is not my favourite by any stretch of the imagination! I've got to glaze it yet and add the ironmongery but it's a smart looking door leading to the orangery, I hope the customer likes it.

An Old Wall Hidden

Not the most interesting post, but I always like to show what sometimes has to happen behind  a blank wall.

Pipework and rough uneven plaster work ment something had to be done about this wall

 The wall in this old house was out of level, the old plasterwork wouldn't provided a key to new plaster and there was pipework to box in.

The timber stud built around the pipework

I decided that the best course of action would be to stud the wall out. This would mean that the new wall would be level and it would also hide all the pipework and the new plasterboard would give the plasterer a much easier job to get a good finish.

All hidden!

Once all this stud work was installed it was time to plasterboard it so hopefully it's never seen again!

I've still quite a bit of work to do in this bathroom but it's only being done on the weekends so not as fast as some of my other jobs.

Lead Tools

I stumbled across this trio of tools the other day.
Lead beating tools I made back in 2005.

Homemade lead working tools

I made these so I could work on fitting lead roll mops to a flat roof on an old property we were working on in the Teme Valley.

Somehow buying these tools didn't enter my head. Instead I found some beech I had in my store and knocked them up in a night so they were ready for the next day. The bossing mallet was a little big (I only had a picture to go on) but it was still useful to "pull" the lead round corners, whereas the chasing chisel was great to get the lead tight into corners and edges - the ferule is a bit of 28m copper pipe to save the end from splitting.

I've Got 99 Problems...

And the van is one. In fact it's more than one. It's pretty much my only problem(s) at the moment.

Half a wing mirror anyone? Last seen going into orbit at around 7.30 in the morning?

Since coming back to work since Christmas it's broke down 4 times, with different problems. The gears, the alternator and the power.

The trouble is I'm not the only one with these problems. There are four of us at work with transits and we've all been going through the same things. What happens to one seems to happen to the others.

When some idiot knocked my wing mirror off on Thursday I joked it would happen to the others. Friday came and the one lad pulled up in his transit not smiling, he was also minus the glass from his drivers side mirror. If one of us crashes I'm staying at home!

 The only advantage has been that everything has been relatively easy to fix but it still costs time, money and a lot of hassle.

The old transit advert used to say transits were the backbone of Britain, if this were true I think we'd be paraplegic. Can't say I'm not a little disappointed with it's performance so far.