beren_writes: Loki smiling with the words "Sweet and innocent ... honestly" (Avengers - Loki sweet and innocent)
2014-11-16 05:14 pm

D.I.Y. Update - Shelves with books!


So most of the books are in now. We have discovered we need to add another section of shelving for the big books, but that will have to go on the other side of the room near the door. We ran out of space :).

All of my art books and a significant number of history books do not yet have a home. You can see them stacked on the floor in this photo:

I have left the images large, so if you want to click on them all and judge me for my taste in books you can ;)

The paperbacks are all in sections and alphabetical, but the hardback and extra-large books in the two left hand sets of shelves are somewhat random.

In this piccie you can see the corner shelf properly too and Rob has kindly moved the ladder.

beren_writes: Hawkeye - says badass with a bow (AV - Badass with a bow)
2014-11-15 05:54 pm

D.I.Y. update - New Shelves! :)

Do our new shelves are up. Can't compliment the company we bought them from enough:
  • great service (we ordered them Thursday and they had them with us by Friday lunchtime even though their delivery date said Monday - we rang them up and asked nicely and they were so helpful and got everything done for us).
  • Easy to assemble, we put ours up in a couple of hours
  • Very stable and strong
Only down side - definitely not cheap. 

This is our study as of last night:

We have been filling it with books since. I'll post another piccie when we've put everything in it :)

In case you are wondering that's 3m wide by 2.4m high. The shelves to the left of the picture are 30cm deep, the second bay is a 30-18cm transition and the last two are 18cm deep shelves. You can set the shelves anyway you want at 5cm intervals.

The right most set is for normal paperbacks, the middle for bigger paperbacks, the transition for all the hardback fiction and the 30cm for all the really big books.
beren_writes: Loki smiling with the words "Sweet and innocent ... honestly" (Avengers - Loki sweet and innocent)
2014-11-12 04:43 pm

NaNoWriMo - Update 4 and D.I.Y. Update

Sorry, I forgot to post NaNoWirmo Updates 1,2 and 3 here, but you can see them over at my Livejournal if you would like :).




As you can see from my graphic, my progress had been a little up and down. I am currently ~400wds behind thanks to my missed days (both the yellow ones were only about 200wrd days and red was none at all :)). However, I finally know who the murderer is! Yay!

For those who haven't seen my other updates, I was bemoaning the fact that I knew who all the players were in the novel, but I didn't know which one of them had committed the murder. For those who have seen nothing of me wittering on about NaNo at all, my novel is as follows:

Mirabel's Bad Day and Beyond (Working Title)

Miri, or Mirabel if you're her mother, is a very powerful witch. When she wakes up on an obnoxiously bright morning she knows it's going to be a bad day. First of all her familiar, Ran, has decided being a cat is no longer interesting enough and has taken to walking around as a naked young man. Not good for her equilibrium, not good at all. Then she bumps into a friend, Ed Hanson, she hasn't seen in five years and she starts feeling the witch's mating urge. Think hornier than Sid James in a Carry On film, only worse. Being a demisexual with few close friends, this is kind of new and confusing.
Oh and her next door neighbour has been murdered, which might be a problem.

The idea is growing as I write and changing a little bit, but the basic premise is still there :). The time line is different, but it's still a murder mystery and Miri is still a witch with something of a personal magical problem. I'm having a lot of fun with it as the universe evolves.

D.I.Y.

I helped lay underlay last night! I know, this might not be news for anyone else, but I am completely D.I.Y. incompetent and I actually managed to help Rob without messing anything up. In fact I actually came up with some sensible suggestions.

The flooring you can see in the picture isn't actually laid yet, it's just in place to make sure we didn't choose really badly and need to go and exchange all the packs we bought for something else :).

The underlay is actually thermal and you can see from the roll sitting to the top of the picture it looks quite space age when you can see the metal surface. We've laid 2/3rds of it, but we can't do the rest until we've put the floor down on the first part and can move the weights machine to where it will be in the room.
As you can see from this second picture, now we have taken out the old carpet and old lino that was on top of it, we actually have a rather nice old wooden floor. Unfortunately we learnt last time we uncovered one of the floors that they may look pretty, but they make for a very cold house.

The floors are open to the elements looking straight under the house and they have gaps between the boards. This means cold winds come straight in. Hence the thermal underlay and the laminate flooring to go on top :).
beren_writes: Loki in cell - says I dare you! (AV - I dare you)
2014-11-10 10:39 am

I'm not sure how we got this much stuff in the study in the first place

So anyone who's been to our house and seen our study knows it's the room where all the junk ends up. We have just emptied it so we can redecorate. We have filled 10 64L plastic boxes with memorabilia, craft stuff, tool and other random things. Most of these are going in the back bedroom where the boxes with lost of VHS tapes used to be (we dumped those earlier in the year).

What is going back in are the exercise machines, the books and the craft stuff and tools that are used more than once every five years. Then the plan is to add a sofa bed of some sort so the room can be used to house sleeping guests from time to time :).

We've taken the door off to give more space, but we'll be putting up a nice insulated curtain over the doorway like we have to our bedroom most of the time.

We have taken down all the current book shelves and we're buying some new ones - very sturdy ones. We are going to lay a new laminate floor (when I say we, that's a royal we, Rob's going to do that because I am totally incompetent at such things). We have already redecorated the walls and that's not a royal we, I helped with that. We spent most of yesterday doing it after spending Friday afternoon and Sat emptying it.

Below the cut are piccies of our house at the moment :)

Click to see piccies and stuff )