mybigadventures.com

Happy birthday mum, I just wanted to add a little note and a picture to wish you a very happy birthday. It may be lockdown but I'm sure we'll have a chance to get together very soon. Have a great day!

Every few years, the website hosting account comes up for renewal and so sparks a sudden flurry of work to keep the site online, and to fix a few bugs that have been giving me a headache. Occasionally if I have some spare time I even try adding a new feature or two. This year the renewal came up and everything was needed at the same time, hosting domain renewal and even the SSL certificate, the cost was a bit eye watering. As is always the case with these things, the renewal price was signifcantly higher than the one offered to new customers. Last time this happened I bought a new hosting package from GoDaddy, downloaded everything, then reuploaded and created all the databases again from scratch. I figured I was going to have to do something similar again so started the download in preparation.

I decided to shop around before going straight back to GoDaddy and came across a great deal with IONIS, in essence you get a free domain and SSL certificate with the hosting, and the hosting account only costs £0.08 p/m for the first year. Bargain! What followed was a little bit of downtime and stress as I migrated the whole site across, but now everything is back in place and working. We're now hosted in the UK so it may even load a little more quickly.

I added a new 404 page to handle any broken links. Let me know if you come across any bugs!

Keep safe and well and we'll get through this lockdown together soon. 

After what seems like endless painting, undercoats and top coats of all the MDF and then walls and ceilings, we eventually finished. The new unit looks great, we've organised someone to refit the carpet next week and there's still some skirting boards to paint at some point but otherwise for now we're finished!

Today we made a start on the shelves inside the new cupboards. The shelf supports we bought from Screwfix are the same sort that you use inside kitchen cabinets and are designed to be adjustable. I liked the idea of being able to set the shelves at different heights so in order to drill the holes inside the cupboard we made another jig out of some spare wood. Once complete we set about drilling the shelf holes.

This worked really well, and in no time we had holes drilled in all four cupboards. 

Now it was time to start painting. We stopped by Screwfix again to buy undercoat paint for all of the MDF, then took the doors off the units and got started. Dani made a start with the white emulsion, painting the ceiling, whilst I made a start undercoating the doors. The doors took two coats of undercoat on each side and with 8 doors to paint for this unit alone, it was looking like a big job. 

There were two main jobs to complete today. First we needed to get the extra wood for the shelf back panel, cut and fit it, and secondly we needed to get some paint. We ended up buying another full sheet of MDF and geting some shelves cut, as the size of the piece needed for the back panel required the bigger sheet. Whilst there we had a look at the paint colours as they are in the middle of a 3 for 2 offer. We saw a Farrow and Ball paint colour, "Pigeon" on the colour chart that we quite liked, but B&Q didn't have it in stock, so we ended up coming away with nothing more than a couple of colour charts. On the way back we also picked up shelf supports from Screwfix for our new shelves.

Back at home we decided to make a trip over to Homebase as they tend to have a larger stock of the Farrow and Ball range. Sadly they didn't have any tins eiither, we did ask about ordering it in, but it was going to take 14 days, so the assistant suggested looking online. Back at home again we found we could order the paint from B&Q with the 3for2 offer and get free next day delivery - winniner! With the paint ordered, we made a start on our other job, cutting the back panel. This ended up being a massive faff, with a height difference of more than 10cm from left to right, this was in addition to cutting the angle away from the back. It took a long time but we were really pleased with the final result. We added wooden blocks to the rear or the backpanel and then secured it in place screwing through the underside of the shelf from inside the cabinet into the blocks. Finally we added decorators caulk along the edge where the MDF met the underside of the eave, and the job was complete.     

After a spot of bowling, we got back to work on the project. Today seemed a little less productive but involved a lot of trial and error. We started off by cutting the shelf for the top of the units. We were really keen to get a nice finish, but neither wall was exactly straight so in order to get the finish we were looking for, there was a lot of measuring, cutting and remeasuring before it was right. 

With the shelf in place, we had decided to make a back panel rather than leave it open to meet the corner of the eave, it was also hoped this may give the illusion that the storage is shallower and less intrusive in the room. We only had enough wood to make half the back panel, but as it was that took the rest of the day. It was quite a complex cut with the angle of the eave having to be trimmed from the back and the the angle at which the roof sloped along the width being taken into account, not to mention the angle when it met the wall. 

It seems we'll need to make another visit to B&Q tomorrow, and we haven't picked out any paint yet!