Womble-ing & Improvising. A photo diary - still in the Med

Ingredients needed to make a quick extension cable :
A 97 metre "offcut" of cable (bought as scrap for £3.42 when I was working at a cable factory - it was too short for them to sell as a 100m roll  )
An empty timber cable reel (thanks to our resident sky dish installer)
A decent metal-clad socket ( found here forum.retro-rides.org/thread/129308/any-advice-pubs-strip )

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To


That was done a few years ago and still looks as good as it did when I made it.

Great thread idea.

Love the first pic...... been there done it.

Once upon a time ...
Step 1 - put a temporary roof over an open back yard to keep things dry.
Step 2 - remove it a few years later and replace with a decent roof
Step 3 - scavenge a smart bay window (Ebay £12 ) remove the side windows and use the center glass & frame. Add a freebie pair of old (Edwardian?) french doors.



Then "just" add strong security mesh inside and the parrots love it   


forum.retro-rides.org/thread/edit/120130

A sunny day, few beers, loud music - sit back and relax or ...






Of all the jobs that got done on the house, this was one of the simplest but made the garden feel huge!
Tip : take hedges down to shoulder height to open up the garden without loosing the feeling of privacy 

A mate is very into woodwork and his wife does a lot of voluntary work with the local church.
When the church lost their overspill storage, they had to get rid of a lot of broken church pews they had been keeping.
He collected a car load, kept what he could use and I got a few of the unwanted bits. It made me happy ! 



Take a Retro 70s sofa-bed (that I'd recovered about 10 years ago just to see if I could  ) and you get ...


I love this type of project. I think we paid £30 for the sofa 2nd hand about 20 years ago so it owes us nothing, the timber was free ...
(if anyone likes the material I've got plenty left, or visit the big local material markets at South Shields / Chester-le-Street)

Another excellent cure for boredom - plastering an Edwardian/Victorian stationmasters house

(the blue bags were full of loose plaster we had pulled off the walls  )


... in mid-winter
On the plus side we got to spend 3 days at a time in the holiday cottage while we working on it, and the local pub had no mobile phone reception so folk were always sociable.


 We "just" had to build a timber frame on the walls, fit insulation, platerboard the walls, then plaster the walls & ceiling.... 

Another installment from the "Make it fit" school of engineering   

When I moved house, the kitchen had "Retro" (wrecked 1970s) units and tiles. Everything was soon stripped out and replaced - the only bit I couldn't change was the big ugly water pipes from the ceiling.

Pipes + "Mk2" extractor hood (Ebay 99p bargain)    


I was given a "Mk1" extractor hood but decided not to use it - the case did donate some useful bits of stainless   
Add an off-cut of windowsill material and a couple of spring-loaded pipe clips (10p each) ...


Job done !

I was going to post this mornings item on here, but you can look in the shed thread.....


I love your mindset.

To me a holiday is where I push the limits on getting stuff done.

No sitting around for me either.

I'm always happy to share my wombling advice, it was a surprise when I did a job for Mrs Womble (unrelated) and she managed to find most of the kitchen stuff below on freecycle / ebay / facebook etc. Well done her! I just had to rip out the old stuff - remove a partition wall - then get creative to make it all fit.
Tip : buy a used kitchen from a 3-bed famiy home that is being updated - you get more material than you need to make a new kitchen in a small flat





I think the ingredients for above were :
used (cream) kitch'n units, winerack & benches from a larger house,
sink was a free (with the used kitchen), taps were from the original kitchen.
breakfast bar was a benchtop offcut + a pair of new chrome legs
cooker unit was made from a cut-down double base unit + new oven + (cheap gumtree) Electric hob
new washing machine
(new windows and flooring were fitted but not really part of this writeup)

There were a few base units left over when the kitchen was finished, these were too large to use anywhere else ... until the backs got cut off (and same done to a bench offcut) to make "made to measure" units for the hallway
(a router is a very handy part of my toolkit for this type of woodwork)