[ A corner next to the bed platform in Tyrava; it has a cabinet built into it, made from old weathered pallet wood. ]
Lots of progress to post about! In between working on a 12×16 cabin for me & the business, I’ve been making improvements to Tyrava. Mostly storage; one of the big problems with small houses is storage. Hence, a cabinet next to the bed, for Jasper to store stuff in.
[A sturdy set of shelves, solidly made from old, weathered wood. They’re an extension to the tool shelves I made last month. They’re about three feet wide, a foot and a half deep, and seven feet tall, and already about half full of Stuff.]
Lotta projects getting done, not so many pictures taken. Gonna work on that, but in the meantime, here we are. With more shelves.
[ Tyrava, seen from the side, takes up part of the driveway; parked next to her, and a little ahead, is a vardo perhaps half her length, green with blue trim, with two windows on the side. ]
Not long after I got back from Colorado, I had a visitor, & so did Tyrava!
My friend Sarah showed up with her wagon house for a couple days at the beginning of her massive road trip. It was really cool getting to see her setup, & we couldn’t resist getting a couple photos of the two vardos together.
Once she got back on the road, though, I had to get to work.
[ Tyrava’s back doorknob, a fancy black lever, is fastened to a heavy-duty handle next to the door by a bungee cord. ]
Not long after setting out — in fact, before I’d actually left the driveway — I realized that Tyrava was having a problem, which was that her back door wasn’t staying shut.
Since she was carrying approximately half of what I own at the time, this was KIND OF A PROBLEM.
The immediate solution was obvious …
… but the actual fix was gonna hafta wait til I’d had a chance to stop at a hardware store.
[ A close view of one of the heavy-duty hinges holding Tyrava’s back door on. The screws that should hold it in place are visibly pulling out of the door. ]
Given that the screws were only an inch long & set into the particle-board interior of the original door, yeah, they were gonna pull out eventually. Fortunately it was an easy fix. Unfortunately I hadn’t brought any clamps big enough, so I hadda buy another one.
… oh well, not like you can have too many clamps.
[ A quick-release clamp that’s a good eighteen inches long sits on the seat of my comfy folding chair, along with a package of more heavy-duty door hinges and a baggie of LONG screws. ]
I’m glad I thought to GET the clamp, otherwise I’d’ve been trying to hold the door in place with one hand & probably my knee while trying to get screws in with the other, & that never goes well. But this made it easy.
[ The door’s all the way open, and clamped into place; one of the screws formerly holding the hinge to the door is partway out, the rest waiting their turn. ]
The new screws are four inches long. THAT oughta last a while.
[ Four new screws holding the hinge in place. Everything looks properly lined up and sturdy. ]
& then I added a third hinge, on the theory that overkill is rarely a BAD idea.
[ There’s now a third heavy-duty hinge between the two that were holding Tyrava’s back door in place. It’s closer to the top one than to the bottom, because I just slapped it on there. ]
Success! The door is held firmly in place! It still closes & opens correctly! It’s not going anywhere!
… it still flaps open if I drive Tyrava over anything bumpy, I DO NOT KNOW WHY & IT IS VERY FRUSTRATING, but at least the door is staying on the hinges now.
originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!
[ A section of Tyrava’s inside walls. It’s about eight feet of wall, framed out with room for a couple windows. ]
That’s where I started Tuesday morning. I had a BUNCH of boards, including a lot of short pieces left over from the other walls, so all I hadda do was cut & sand & fasten & repeat. By the end of the day, I’d gotten a lot done.
[ That wall section that’s right next to Tyrava’s front door is done now, all the way to the top. At the base of the wall is a scattering of tools and stuff, including a rubber mallet, a drill and driver set, and a lot of screws. ]
Last bits!
[ A slightly fisheyed view of one of Tyrava’s side walls, which is now entirely paneled in reclaimed wood. There’s a single window about halfway down. Right now it’s just a hole covered with tyvek. ]
It’s an entire wall!
Next up, that window!
originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!
[ Yes, it’s the same interior wall I’ve been working on for … a while now. The section closest to the camera is entirely unfinished, & the part beyond that has wall boards about halfway up. ]
[ A small label printer, about 4x4x6″, sits in an open drawer, with 4×6 labels stacked behind it. There’s a small space between the front of the printer, where the labels come out, & the front of the drawer. ]
(This was written on Monday but scheduled for Wednesday; who knows what’ll happen between now & then!)
So I got this new shipping label printer a couple months back, & it’s really been making shipping go a LOT more smoothly. I stuck it in the top drawer of my printer file cabinet, & it fits just fine, but the labels, when they come out, kind of curl up against the front of the drawer & I have to keep an eye on them.
So I decided to fix that. With power tools.
[ The front of the drawer, once black, is now grey, with some of the colour sanded away. There’s a horizontal slot cut in the drawer, pretty unevenly. ]
It doesn’t look great, but it works, & it gave me something to think about other than the possibly-impending death of democracy. Anyway once I paint it it’ll look better.
I’ve been meaning to do this one for a while, really, but wanting to NOT be at the computer, doomscrolling, made this a perfect time to finally get round to it.
I’ve also been meaning to make a proper book stand for my herbal recipes book, & putting it off because all of the ‘easy’ DIY things I found wanted me to cut wood at an angle, which I do NOT have the tools to do in any useful manner. No, not even with a mitre block, look, I can mess up a straight line when I’ve got the guide clamped in eight places, I’m TALENTED is what.
I need a table saw.
In the meantime, I faked it with mostly-straight lines, using detailed plans that involved ‘bring the book outside & hold wood up against it until something works’.
[ My book of herbal recipes sits open on a table, outside, with my hand holding a couple of short lengths of wood along the bottom edge. ]
The finished product! Or at least ‘done enough to test’.
[ The back is made from a roughly sanded piece of scrap wood, maybe an inch wider than the book on each side but shorter than the book is tall. A thin length of wood has been screwed along the bottom for the book to rest on, & an even smaller length of wood is attached to the top front of the bottom piece to hold the book in place. ]
As I’d suspected would happen, the bit at the bottom wasn’t high enough to hold the book in on its own, so I added another bit for tilting purposes.
[ There’s now another small piece of wood running along the bottom front of the book stand, causing it to tilt backwards. ]
Of course, that bit of tilt was enough to make it fall over backwards, & while I could have left it that way & depended on the wall to hold it up, I knew better.
[ A larger piece of wood, maybe an inch by an inch & running most of the width of the stand, has been attached to the back piece, but just a bit up from the bottom, so that it supports the book stand at an angle. ]
Success! Here’s a side view so you can see how it all goes together.
[ Side cross section! The tall back piece tilts slightly to the left, held in place by the piece behind it; in front, a short horizontal piece sticks out at the bottom, with matching small lengths of wood on top & on the bottom at the outer edge. ]
& it even holds the book in place! Like it’s supposed to! Seriously, this is gonna make things a LOT easier.
[ My recipe book, in place in my work table, neatly held on the book stand. It’s not falling off or anything! ]
I finished the day up by adding a couple more boards to Tyrava’s inside walls. I’m gonna run out of denim insulation soon; the stuff had better come back into stock someday.
[ One section of one of Tyrava’s inside walls; short lengths of wood fastened horizontally cover it from the bottom to a little more than halfway up, & from behind the top piece, blue denim insulation is visible. ]
I also spent some time cleaning up out front — I brought in the show shelves & stuff, which are in DESPERATE need of another coat or two of linseed oil after spending the summer out in the sun, & I’ve been slowly picking up wood & sorting it out. Anything still big enough to be used goes into Tyrava, & everything else gets stacked up for firewood.
Little steps. Plus, bonus, I didn’t have to think about huge existential things for a couple hours!
originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!
[ Tyrava’s front door frame, which is painted purple; a length of unpainted wood maybe an inch wide & half an inch deep runs along the inside of the frame, right where the door will stop when it’s closed properly. ]
Last Saturday & today I got a bunch done on Tyrava, including the door stops all the way around the front door. Since I’m not terribly good at cutting things precisely & there were big gaps around the door, this is a VERY good thing.
It was easy where the door frame is straight, of course, but the curved parts were trickier.
Last time I got the mail I carried back three boards, so I knew I had enough to finish the back wall today. I put nothing else on my schedule for today, nothing to distract me from getting it all done. & it worked!
Above, the right side, done to the bottom of the arch, with the traditional piece turned 90 degrees to fill in the last gap.
What with one thing & another I am … slightly behind on posting. But my new phone has an excellent camera & a sturdy case so I went outside & took some pictures of what I’ve been working on the last couple weeks.
There’s a big fire in the Tonto National Forest in Arizona, & what that has to do with progress on Tyrava might seem non-obvious but the prevailing winds are bringing a LOT of smoke this way, so I’ve been staying inside as much as I can. But I’ve slipped outside a couple times to get some little things taken care of.
The latches finally showed up, & they worked even better than I’d hoped. LOOK at that. & it holds the shutter closed without the slightest wiggle. I am VERY pleased.
I mean. There’s Stuff going on, & it’s Distracting, focus is … not entirely a thing. But I am getting things done!
Above: shelves, for a set of shelves that will, once they’re done, hold all my soap backstock. Given that currently that’s sort of shoved in a corner in my workroom, this is a needed piece of furniture.
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