Restoring an old Die-cast Lantern....

My wife's away at the moment, visiting relatives and friends in her native country.   One of the list of '...orders...' she left behind was for me to tidy-up my workshop.  

She's been away for over three weeks but is due back very soon, and so I thought it best to tackle this particular item on the list....

As part of the clear out, I identified several non-electrical bits and pieces which could safely be stored in one of the unheated sheds in the garden.  So I hauled these items down the garden path, but when I was stashing them in the smaller shed I came across the old die-cast aluminium lantern that used to hang beside our front door.   

It was in a very sorry state, but despite the wife's objections I'd hung on to it with a view to one day perhaps cleaning it up and putting it back into service - when we bought the house, it was one of the first items to be ripped out during the refurbishment works.

So I dug it out and had a closer look at it.   With the nights closing in and the wife due to return to our local airport on an evening flight, I thought the illuminated lantern might be a pleasant 'welcome home' symbol after I'd picked her up from the airport, and therefore now would be the right time for a restoration.
.

After a little initial scraping and wire brushing....

Garden Review 2013 - Fruit & Veg...

With September now in full swing and the autumnal equinox fast approaching, it's a chance to review our successes and failures during the fruit and vegetable growing season....


SUCCESS ....

Tomatoes - in early March, we'd started these off from seeds in 3" pots on the kitchen windowsill.   This meant they missed all of the effects of the very cold April, and the weather had recovered to more seasonal norms before they were planted out in the new greenhouse.  We've had literally hundreds of tomatoes from our 14 plants, and there's more still to come.  With the amount of headroom we have in this greenhouse, there's fruit on eight or nine trusses on each plant.

tomato plants in August...

Growing Raspberries & Cranberries from Seed...

For some time, we'd been toying with the idea of growing soft fruit bushes from seeds – there's plenty of space on the greenhouse shelves for starting them off.   Growing fruit from seed is a fraction of the price of buying rootstocks, even if they're bare-rooted.  The major downside is that it may take much longer to get the plants established from seed.

It was actually more difficult to find seeds than established plants, although I had managed to find one eBay supplier based in Lithuania selling seeds for raspberries, blueberries, cranberries and blackcurrants, among others.  I suppose an even cheaper alternative may have been to buy some fresh fruit from the market and then prepare our own seeds from a few of them.

However, we ordered some raspberry and cranberry seeds for around £1 per packet, and they arrived at the beginning of June.  

Looking at the instructions provided for each type of fruit seed, they were both very similar.  To cool the seeds for at least a month, and preferably longer, presumably to fool them into thinking it's darkest winter from which they will then awaken and burst into life when the temperature is returned to normal.  This process is called 'stratification' by the horticulturists.

Rescuing Blackcurrant Canes....

In the local Poundshop earlier in the summer, they were selling some small blackcurrant plants at 2 for £1, half the usual price because they were bare-root stock and it was already late May, well past the time when they should have been planted.  They were in a sorry state - all had some sort of new forced growth although it was very pale in colour due to the absence of light where they'd been stored.   They were labelled as Ribes Negrum, so they're a true blackcurrant, and the variety is 'Ojebyn' which seems to be a popular European variety from an internet search.

Anyway, we bought ten of them for £5, got them home and unwrapped the roots which at least were still moist from the polythene wrappings.   We stood them in a bowl of water and then pruned them back to just above where we could see new buds.  On one or two, the new pale growth was only an inch or two long, so we left these on thinking that they were short enough to fully recover.

after pruning, soaking in a bowl of water

When less means more....why electricity prices will rise and rise....

Electricity prices are going up – that much you already know from your bills.  You'd think the only option is to use less of the stuff....

Well, get used to the idea - they're going to continue to go up, and the less electricity everyone uses then the higher the prices are going to be.

Why is this ? 

Some commentators blame energy price rises on the lack of new oil and gas reserves, the expense of their extraction, or political instability in the major producing regions.

However, the real reason is much simpler.  Do you really think that the shareholders of these energy companies are going to suffer simply because you use less of their product, particularly when they feel they're forced to operate in a grossly distorted market ?

In a way, of course, they have a valid point... 

Electricity cannot effectively be stored in large quantities and therefore energy on demand is provided by standby and swing capacity units, namely thermal power stations - those things that burn fossil fuels to keep the lights on come what may.

Forget the wind farms, when the wind doesn't blow the standby stations have to kick into action and make up the entire shortfall between demand and supply. 

The trouble is, of course, that all of the fixed costs associated with maintaining and operating a 'big block' asset must still be met even if it's producing nothing at all for periods.

There's debt to be serviced, sustaining capital to keep the asset up to scratch, spare parts for equipment, maintenance costs and plant operators sitting around doing nothing at all but making themselves available 24 hours per day for when the big block needs to kick into action.   

And all this against a backdrop of increasingly stringent and costly environmental, employment and health & safety legislation with which it's necessary for them to comply.

Installing a new window - and without Acrow Supports...

Since the time we were developing our new garden space, in which we opened up the area immediately to the west of the house that was previously occupied by the old metal shed and the polycarbonate greenhouse, we'd also been thinking about putting a new window in the home office. 

This building was previously an attached garage, but was converted to living space by the last occupiers.  Now, just less than half of this former garage space is the office and the remainder is my workshop with the machine tools etc.

I had a vision of sitting at my desk and working while looking out onto our new garden and the open views beyond, over the fields of the adjacent farm.  Well, today that vision became a reality...

To start with, I'd bought a complete 1,200 x 1,200 mm (nominal) uPVC double-glazed window unit in an eBay auction for the princely sum of £67.  This came off the gable end of a relatively new-built house when the owners were constructing an extension, so it's a modern unit and contains quite efficient glazing panels.   

I then spent several days in preparing layouts and calculations in determining the best way of constructing and installing a lintel over the large aperture to be created.

By measuring both the internal and external room dimensions, we established that the wall in question was around 145 mm thick in total.   I reckoned this was around 100 mm in the single-course brickwork and the rest in insulation, battens and plasterboard finishes etc.  I marked the wall externally with chalk to get a better feel for the size and final installation position. However, this initial mark-out was quickly washed away in a heavy rainstorm !

the new window and the initial marking out....

Investing update....

It's a slack day on the work front today, and so here's a bit of an update on the investment 'strategy'.

Following on from my post in February, it's been a decent enough ride for the shares and funds that I held onto after my selling spree at the turn of the year.

As I write, I'm still sitting on around 60% cash in both the ISA and the SIPP pots, having resisted the temptation to jump back in at valuation levels I thought to be too high.  

The steady rise that marked the first half of the year wasn't one with too many opportunities for me, since the games I tend to play depend on much more market volatility.  OK, so I may have lost something to inflation by not being fully invested, but I'm more comfortable with that than simply taking hopeful punts in a rising market, and all the while I'm keeping my powder dry for any chances that come along in the future.