Week 192: Carpentry

The carpenters came and spent five days making the built-in storage we wanted. We now have a couple of cupboards under the stairs, suitable for storing our Bromptons and other inconvenient items like the clothes airer, and a smaller cabinet with bookshelves above.

We had to clear space for them to work, which meant that the kitchen was full of stuff and the only habitable room was the bedroom. I spent most of the week hiding out in LJ’s garden office, popping in to make them coffee from time to time.

It’s a huge change from how the house looked when we first moved in. It’s wonderful to have the ability to store things away tidily.

A staircase in the middle of a room. The floor is a synthetic wood-effect,
the staircase is carpeted in beige, and the banisters are painted a matt dark
brown. The area under the staircase is open. — The staircase as it was when we bought the house

The same staircase as before. The banisters have been replaced with
thin steel railings, there is a wooden handrail, and the space underneath
is filled in with a couple of large triangular cabinets and a region set
slightly further back with a storage cupboard and shelves. The floor is made
of actual wood. — The staircase as it is now

They also fitted a flush cupboard in the dead space above the toilet, and put a cabinet and shelving into the end of the office, an oddly shaped space where the floor is partly raised to accommodate the staircase below. After three years of barely being able to get to my books, I now have spare shelf space!

The quality of the work is excellent, and the only downsides were that they needed our whole living room to work in for the week, and that they started work very early, at half past seven every morning. I am not an early riser, and that was painful. But it was worth it.

This is the company we used and I would recommend them.

Not being able to use the kitchen meant that we had to find places to eat. It didn’t go brilliantly. One evening we walked down to the nice pizza restaurant only to find that they were on holiday. The next evening we went to a new place I’d found on Google Maps. It even had recent reviews. And yet it didn’t exist.

The only remaining piece of work to be done in our house is the shutters. They’ve been measured and manufactured, and they’re currently en route from Malaysia on a container ship, taking the long route round the Cape to avoid the Red Sea. I’ve been tracking the ship: it’s currently near the Bay of Biscay, and due to dock at Felixstowe in a couple of days.

Links:

Carpentopod: A walking table project.
Even laypeople use legalese. “[C]onvoluted structures may be inserted to effectively signal the authoritative nature of the law, at the cost of increased reading difficulty”.
SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL.
AI worse than humans at summarising information, trial finds. “A test of AI for Australia's corporate regulator found that the technology might actually make more work for people, not less.”
DSP56300 Emulation: Emulating the Access Virus C and other virtual analogue synthesizers.
Paywall Skipper does what it says on the tin.
Mexican bat found to have photoluminescent feet. Twinkle toes.
What Is React.js? “A not inconsiderable amount of JavaScript, written by some self-styled engineers, to help a website called Facebook undermine democracy, foment genocide, and do whatever else is needed to sell virtual advertising space.”