Just some news on the horizon. Landlord has been finishing up some details around the back yard.
One of the things in that backyard is this:
 |
| It's a 6m x 6m garage, required by the Shire for a 3br house. |
Some Recent History:
It was only being erected in that shot, in mid-August. In fact the shed guy's ladder is the one in the shot. That house to the left is the second house that the landlord split the block for and that's been another thing that's caused huge amounts of chaos in our lives, but the returns have been worth it. One of those things was that the local Shire required a lot of stuff that's required under their new building code.
Aside from shrinking our yard space by 96% (which has been a bit of a squeeze but also now he looks after all the rest of the block so we're spared a burdensome expense) there have been a lot of other things that came of it - roof got replaced after leaking for years, electrics got replaced as they were so old that rooms had actually lost power, and the most recent, the bathroom got a complete makeover to find a huge leak.
And the other thing that came out of it is that a 3-bedroom house must now have a 2-car garage. . . We have a car, and a mobility scooter. The scooter's been kept in its own shed, but the car's probably never seen a garage in its 14 years of life, and definitely not in its last three years since we've had it.
Here's the bonus: The "shared driveway" is fine for me to park in, and it's back from the highway far enough that road debris and dust isn't an issue there. On. The. Other. Hand. If there's ever a storm or hail, I'd like to put the car into the garage. And I'd like to garage the mobility scooter permanently because my wife really likes the freedom it provides so it really needs to be kept secure and clean.
On. The. Other. Other. Hand. I'll be losing my 3m x 3m shed and have already lost the old "garage" which had rusted-shut doors but was still good for storage. I need that. And the landlord has I think been very aware of it. I had (approximately) 24sqm for all of that, the new garage has 36. Plus another 6sqm behind it. 42 is the answer to LTUAE. . .
But I Still Want To Garage The Car Too. Okay - it's a mid-size SUV (embarrassed cringe) but it was right in our price range, our old car had failed the roadworthy, and the new vehicle is 10 years newer than the old Hyundai. We barely use it anyway - shopping, medical appointments. We fill the tank once a month or sometimes even longer. And if I could have a hybrid or full EV I'd jump at the chance. So - suck it up, we're at the time of life when we need wheels.
I also want a workshop again (I did have that in my 3x3, briefly) and space to keep all the workshed and yard paraphernalia and materials - and the mobility scooter, and, occasionally, be able to garage the Buttercup.
I'll be posting this immediately, unscheduled, because I realised all the disruptions lately have put a dent in my scheduled blog article posts.
Bring on - Tinkercad:
 |
| The software that lets you CAD when you can't CAD. |
Using Tinkercad lets me design things that I can't do in CAD packages. (I really am shyte at CAD - I got spoiled by Second Life's methods of building, and no amount of me cudgelling my brains has ever been of use.) So a few hours running around with a tape measure and notebook and then drawing cubes and cylinders and you have a workable alternative to the old "graph paper and cutouts" way of doing things. And as a bonus - it's a bit twee, it's free, and it's 3D! Do that with graph paper.
So you have the end of our house on the left, the laundry outbuilding in white in the centre, and the neighbour's garage wall in battleship grey on the right. You can see two panels of fence across the left and across the old driveway between the laundry and neighbour's garage. Close to the centre you can see me if you zoom in - you'll know it's me because of the "T" on my pocket. behind me is the garage and the "shared driveway." The orange cones are to stop me walking off the grid. 😸
Behind me is the Buttercup beast, and the jet fighter (don't hate - I just looked for two vehicles in the shared library because I thought two big featureless slabs were just too boring for a blog article) is the mobility scooter. The two black prisms and the two yellow/orange prisms are some warehouse rack shelving for storage. The grey prisms (one behind the jetplane scooter, one further right of that) are the cheap tinplate shelving you used to be able to buy for a tenner a unit but I think they've been discontinued due to the amount of customer they sliced up or something.
Anyway. I've had those units for the best part of ten years, pulled apart and reassembled when we moved or our needs changed, and I still have all my fingers and body parts. The pale green, blue, and light blue prisms are the four workbench sub-units I've either already built or will finish in the next few months. (The top green one and the dark blue one are already made, the pincushion and light blue are in waiting.) The pink thing next to it is a trolley I made from two plywood sorters I found at some secondhand shop for five bucks apiece and some scrap wood and castors I had laying around. It's gotten older since 2020 but it's still as useful as it ever was.
 |
| Made from junk sorting-bins and scrap wood I had laying around. |
The two dark grey prisms below that are some metal Brownbuilt workshop cupboards that I'll probably use for epoxies, paints, and solvents, and perhaps abrasives and other dangerous materials. Gas bottles for torches etc.
And the green thing - now that is a surprise. Landlord was in the new garage the other day and I was daydreaming about where I'd put things and he has a workbench from another tenant that skipped at some point in the past and I can have it. He doesn't know it yet but if he won't accept payment for it I'll make a donation at the charity of his choice.
And if he doesn't, well - I have enough small utility workbenches and gear that I can build myself the same bench. It'll take me longer but I'll still have it. If you help out with the graphic below and donate a few bucks, I'll have it all the sooner and will be able to post new projects here.
Back to the plans. As you can see, if I put the benches away in the rough locations shown, I can easily reverse Buttercup in. At all other times, it'll be parked just outside on the garage apron. And the observant and curious will have noticed I still haven't described a few other things, so here we go into bonus territory:
Extras.
Doing Solar
You may have noticed a transparent-y(ish) violet thing at the extreme right. Since my old shed had to be - for lack of a better word, bastardised - to fit into the (not quite, alas! Missed it by 30mm...) 3m width of the old driveway between our laundry and the neighbour's garage, I have an $800 pile of cheap glavanised tin and pressed tin ribs and struts which at the moment are still assembled but aren't going to be for very long, as they're not really in the plan for the place. In a word, it's scrap in a few weeks. And I can use some of that to make a lean-to roofed area between the garage and the fence.
Landlord's given his blessing, and so I can put up a short skillion roof the 6m length of the garage as long as it's not a permanent structure, which this will not be, being set atop concrete slabs and stabilised with (strong) ties to stakes in the ground. Now - I have one 240W solar panel atop my old shed, charging an old car battery, and it will fit on top of that temporary roof just fine. (And may be joined by another one or two, if I come across any bargains.)
It's currently only used occasionally to power 12V gizmos like a small tyre pump compressor, lights, and the occasional project I'm testing. But with a decent inverter it can already power our freezer via an extension cord if we have one of our rare but inevitable power outages, and it could already do this for 6-10 hours. With more panels and batteries I think we could keep our frozen food safe for 24 hours. It's a project among many.
And you'll also have noticed the timber trees in the three posts holding it up. Those will store almost every bit of my longer timber supplies, all the "scrap timber" half my projects end up being made from. So that takes care of 95% of longer materials including PVC pipes etc.
And One (Two!) More Things
There's also the blue cabinet and the orange cylinder outside the garage. Hmmmm.....
Orange thing will be my dust collector "cyclone" where air from the workshop tools gets drawn in along with chips and shavings and sawdust, swirled around, drops to the bottom, and right at the top, hopefully much cleaner air gets sucked into the lower left side of the blue cabinet where for the moment is a Homelite shop vac but I'm aiming for making a lower flow but more powerful turbine someday and then I'll be safe enough from workshop dust to make me happy.
The lower RH side will be the battery compartment for the solar panel(s) - and the shallower upper section of it will hold charging modules, power modules, control modules, inverter, etc.
All that's missing is to get wifi out to there. I have some old routers I may be able to press in to service, may need to make a longer range antenna for the garage end of it, but once it's there I'll be able to manage all the workshop power and also be able to check information as I'm working.
And there's a grey cross over the top. No I haven't set a demon trap (too much "Supernatural"..) it's just that if I'd drawn the two crossed wires to scale they'd have been invisible. And what they're up there for is to hold "curtains" (probably old sheets or old tarpaulin pieces) to keep workshop dust off the scooter and shield off the rear part of the garage if needed to contain dust from working. I know it seems I'm a bit gung-ho about dust but I'm pensioned with several respiratory issues and so working with masks and dust collection/extraction is pretty important.
If you'd like to help me, share this post and moy others, post links on your social media and messaging, also go back up to my cute li'l graphic a few paragraphs back and click the newspaper to go to my News Stand where you can see my most recent posts and subscribe to my weekly newsletter. If you want to really help, click the KoFi cup or the Paypal icon and make a donation or even a monthly one. It'd help me a lot with keeping my blogs and projects running, and you get all the articles, and plans for stuff I design and build. And I get to keep my pension instead of paying server fees and domain fees and scraping what few bucks I have left after living expenses to buy materials.
No comments:
Post a Comment