Roselea

Category: Garage

The Garage

  • Toilet in Garage Serviced, and Also Garden Shredder Fitted With New Replacement Cutting Shoe

    Today, for this hot Sunday. We tackled a long overdue job of servicing the toilet in the back of the Garage. There was an overflow problem and it seems to have gotten worse in the last few months. Our water bill said that our consumption has gone up significantly. So we inspected the water inlet valve mechanism and discovered a small lump of foreign material. We cleaned the valve and put it back together and all seems to be back to normal again. But we did have to replace the front plasterboard panel that made up the boxing surrounding the cistern.

    We also glued the old ceramic toilet bowl on one side where there was an old crack from years ago when we rescued this serviceable piece of bathroom ware from the outside toilet as it was then when we brought the property 17 years ago. It probably was the original toilet from when it was constructed way back in the 1945 approximately we think!!
    Then after the Formula 1 Grand Prix, we serviced the garden shredder, our heavy duty machine that chops up garden waste up to to 40mm thick fresh branches or 25mm dry stuff! The shredder needed a new “crunching” aluminium plate shoe that is adjustable to achieve zero gap between the slowly rotating steel blades and this shoe, ensuring that the plant material is chopped into pieces, no matter how small or thin it is. It has a clever trick of crunching the thicker pieces so the woody parts are slit apart to speed up composting.

    The old aluminium plate had a crack across its structure and that is probably what had caused the shredder to not work very well for a while now.
    We tested out the newly serviced machine with a large pile of holly clippings (recently freshly done) and a really old pile of ivy trimmings and produced about 6 very large trug loads of shredded material and a couple of trugs of leaves, all dumped onto our pile of sod at the top of our garden.

  • Electric Supply Moved!

    Today we had our electric supply moved from the old place to the new place!

    Our electrician came this morning at around 10am, to test and supply a certificate of worthiness. The EDF people came about 11:30am (two of them) and did everything in one hour! They dug a hole down to the old steel wrapped twin core cable, moved the old meter, hacksawed and sliced into the old cable and threaded the new aluminium 6mm diameter with 25 thin copper wires woven mesh outer covering through the conduit into the garage.

    We now have a 100amp fuse but still our old meter. We will order a new one! Hopefully it will be a smart one!


    The electrician finished testing and connecting the consumer unit to the new supply. We are back up and running!

  • Bits and Pieces #2

    Yesterday and today, we did further tidy ups of outstanding tasks.

    The chest freezer has been moved from the outside shed to the new kitchen. It was cleaned top to bottom, inside and out, all edges and corners! It is gleaming now!

    All the shelves have been washed down (in the kitchen) ready for the migration of all the “stuff” from the old kitchen!

    A tester module has been built to check each digital thermometer probe, all are working!

    The hot tank has settled down and it is producing good quantity of hot water (running up at about 70 degree Celsius). the insulation and the cover are now back in place.

    The air con unit is in the full recirculation mode, much of the old air is cycled back into the rooms to maximise retention of the heat. This is to allow us to heat up the fabric of the building before we move in.

    The shower tray is now completed and is now connected to the supplies coming out of the floor and the waste is connected. No leaks! The shower pump is also working just fine!

    The temperature probes from the heat exchanger are ready for connection to the controller. In the morning the joint between the tray and the walls will be sealed.

    And the lounge carpet has been finally stapled down. We were waiting for the carpet to settle as it has a very heavy and stiff backing with a crease down the middle of the room. But today we gave up waiting and did the best we could to pull the carpet out flat.

    We are more or less ready for the move!

    The plan is to move most of the kitchen over first and then the part of the lunge and then each bedroom separately, over the next week or so.

  • Miscellaneous Bits and Pieces

    For the last three days, we have been doing odds and ends of tasks which needs completing before we can move.

    The shower tray and the heat exchanger are coming together. The adjustable foots to lift the tray and seal up to the walls inside the shower cubicle was glued and screwed on. It is a wedge shaped piece of timber where we can slide in the wedge to raise the tray up.

    We installed another electric cable back to the house to provide additional power. This will allow us to run the immersion heater and fan heaters to warm up the living space ready for us to move in, before the mains electricity meter is moved in 2 weeks time.

    We also installed a network cable at the same time to provide a link back to the telephone master socket and maintain our connections to the outside world, while we wait for BT to come and move our master socket from the old house to the garage.

    The temperature probes were installed in their various places of monitoring, the rain water tank, the air con unit, the hot water tank and the shower heat exchanger.

    A temporary curtain of strips to make an insulating door between the garage and the garden room (the kitchen), made of geo-textile fabric, each strip being 50mm (2inches) wide and weighted with old nuts & bolts to make the strips fall back into their resting position and maintain a better heat insulation.

    we have also started unloading some of our personal boxes into our bedrooms, mostly books.

  • Thermometer Probes for Controlling the Home Environment

    the Home environment needs controlling to maintain efficiency and best use of the resources so thermometer probes are needed to find out what the air con unit is doing so it can be controlled as well as room temperature.







    These probes are digital, producing a temperature reading in 9bits to provide a reading between -50 degree Celsius to +125 degree Celsius with 0.5 degrees resolution and a 0.5 degrees accuracy.

    The places where these probes are to be used are as follows:

    . Air Con unit

    . Shower and the recycling heat exchanger

    . Hot water tank

    . Underground rain water tank

    Most of them are for scientific inquisitiveness and the data will be recorded on the server and displayed on the web as graphs to show how well (or badly) the various systems are working, what the seasonal variations the rain water temperature is and of course keeping us warm (Winter) or cool (Summer)!

  • Toilet Gains Extra features!

    The toilet in the Garden Room now has a mirror (600mm high and 450mm wide) a flat plane of glass with no edging or bevel, just screwed up with four screws in each corner. Two wire double trays mounted on either side of the mirror on the side walls. A toilet roll holder and a towel rail also mounted on the back wall under the window.


    The sliding doors has a pair of knobs fitted. Along the edge where the two doors comes into contact, magnetic strips were stuck on to “lock” the doors together when the toilet is engaged! The only problem was that the magnetic strips proved to be far stronger than we had anticipated! We needed a crowbar to get them apart again (well not a crowbar exactly but .. ..!). We solved the problem by sticking very thin strips of plastic on the magnets so they are kept apart further when the two sliding doors closes, the power of the magnetic force is reduced and it worked!!

  • Garden Room (Kitchen) Shelves Up!

    All the shelves are now on their brackets in all locations around the Garden Room! The brackets were nicely dry from the oven.


    Just a little touch up job here and there and bits and pieces are being installed ready for the big move!

  • Garden room Shelves All Painted

    We have completed the task of applying the full gloss coat to all 27 pieces of shelving for the Garden Room, acting as our temporary kitchen for the next two or three years!

    We have pulled together two collections of brackets, 54 270mm long ones and 30 170mm in length. These will hold up the 300mm and 400mm plus the 200mm deep shelves. The metal brackets were washed in NilGrim, hot water and dried in our new ovens!


    All the selves have now been gently rubbed with fine paper and the edges treated with a caulk filler to remove the worst of the nature of OSB construction. It is not perfect as the caulk shrinks and where it has filled deeper holes, has shrank further. But these shelves are purely of a practical nature and absolute prettiness is not essential for a Garden Room therefore the minimal effort and money spent on it.

    OSB boards is certainly a very versatile and strong but cheap material for construction but not really suitable for finishing work! But the Garage and Garden Room are ideal locations for such material for shelving, being a rough and tumble sort of place, containing tools, tins, boxes and other less than “artful” objects!

  • Garden Room Shelving

    The 27 pieces of shelving for the Garden Room was finished being sanded smooth this morning. All were vacuumed to remove all the dust and first half painted before lunch.

    Then after lunch, while the second batch was painted, the first was gently rubbed with fine sandpaper and the edges filled with caulk, ready for the full gloss coat tomorrow.


  • Kitchen Final Coat & Shelves Prepared

    The second coat of Oil White paint was applied to the various surfaces that were painted the day before. The shower cubicle is now a gloss white along with the hot tank & air con cupboards and the shelves under the sink & its worktop.

    The shelves were sanded and rounded, all 26 separate pieces! The shelves near the doorway into the garage had their corners chopped off to avoid that sharp jab when trying to cut the corner off!