… the butternut eats you.
This is a butternut from our garden.
This is my thumb after peeling said butternut.
So now I know that butternut juice strips the skin off your hands if you peel it while it’s fresh. You have to cure the damn thing for a couple of weeks after picking it.
Live and learn.
As mentioned previously, I finally got around to completing firstly the door and then the TV part of the shelving.
Well, the third shelf also materialised, with a lot of fighting and cursing.
Update: and after populating with a small selection of our books:
(There are quite a few shelves still to come.)
This one goes around the TV. First step, bolt the TV bracket to the wall.
Looking good.
I will have to make a plan with the white wall behind the TV.
The reason I’m doing this in stages is that I wasn’t sure exactly where this unit would end up. It could have been 5cm to the left or the right. Now I can measure the remaining space and design a bookshelf to fit.
This is something I’ve been planning for years, finally figured I’d get Frank to do it since I’m not getting around to it myself.
15mm black irrigation pipe, on brackets, running all the way down the side of the house and around the corner. Once I add microjets, I’ll be able to water the whole stretch at the turn of a tap. Ain’t technology awesome?
In South Africa, we call Victorian iron fretwork “Broekie Lace“. I have no idea why.
Anyway, we found this lamp post outside Brad & Lynn’s house. He didn’t want it (he has plans involving security cameras), so plans were made, mostly involving a chisel and a rather large hammer.
Back home, some more plans were made, this time involving an angle grinder, and a somewhat smaller hammer and chisel.
Does the number 374788 mean anything to anybody when it comes to cast iron fretwork?
Wire brushed and painted.
(yea, crappy photo. Difficult with the light and on-camera micro-flash).
The 12mm plank at the top is level. The brickwork definitely isn’t. Once all the woodwork is in I’ll fill the gap and paint it and you won’t know it’s there… I hope.
2010-11-08: Edit to add another pic.
A while ago I speculated wildly about the cost of heating a jacuzzi. Since then, I got hold of an hour meter and fitted it, so I now know exactly how long the element is on for.
Turned the jacuzzi on on Friday evening, with the water at 10 degrees. On Saturday evening the temperature was at 46 (! — I modified the thermostat a little and my setting was obviously off) with the hour meter reading 12.17 hours. Since the element is a 4kW unit, that’s 48.68 kWh, which costs around R50 these days.
My original calculations worked out to about 28 kWh, but it did not factor in heat loss — i.e. the energy to heat the water, not to keep it warm.
Well, the hour meter reports that the element was on for six hours from Saturday evening to Sunday afternoon (a period of 19 hours), keeping the water at 40 degrees and the cats happy (they discovered they can lie on the cover, their own hot-water bed). This work out(roughly) to 30 kWh (or R30) per day.
Bottom line: a jacuzzi loses a lot of heat to radiation, and it’s cheaper to turn it on as needed than to leave it on all the time.
When I started this blog, it was all about the house.
Well, things have moved on, and while the house still needs lots of attention, I’ve also started blogging about guns and cars and computers.
I figured that this is not fair to houseblogs.net readers, so I spent a little time figuring out how to exclude some posts from going there.
Turns out it’s dead simple. Changing the RSS feed to http://www.retro.co.za/blog/?feed=rss2&cat=-6,-56 excludes categories 6 and 56, being “Guns” and “Cars” (I left the “Geek” for Laura-Jane).
So if you’re running WordPress, and you don’t want the wrath of Aaron… :-)
Via houseblogs, I found Pecan Place.
What an absolutely gorgeous house.
And they like old radios too! And clocks!
And wOOOOt look at this doorknob!
These are the invoices for most of the stuff I bought for the first year of renovating the house. Of course I don’t have invoices for the labour. I stuck it all in a spreadsheet and *gasp* threw the originals away (I *never* throw anything away).
It represents about R 230 000 I spent between April 2008Â and April 2009. Amazing how a hundred here and a thousand there can add up to real money.
