mybigadventures.com

This week was half term and unlike previous years we hadn't made any plans to go for a short city break. Our tenants at the house had given us notice so we had decided to have a look at the house in Leeds and get some estate agents around to value it for a possible sale. We managed to fit quite a lot in on Monday, getting three agents around and doing some gardening whilst there. So the short story is, we've decided to sell. Just a few bits to sort out and and then it'll be hitting the market.

In other news, I've added a few new albums to the site. We've been out to a couple of places over the last month, visiting Ham House and Hampton Court Palace. Both trips were pretty grey days in terms of the weather with plenty of cloud cover but thankfully the rain held off.

We visited Ham House on a weekend in the middle of January. It is National Trust so the cards came in handy for free entry. We spent a couple of hours in the gardens but didn't get into the main house as there were only limited tours and we didn't fancy waiting an extra hour at the end of the day - maybe next time. The gardens were nice although obviously not a huge amount to see for the time of year. The sun was warm when it came out from behind the clouds but it was otherwise quite a cold day. 

        

We managed to get half price tickets for Hampton Court Palace at the beginning of February costing £8.25 each instead of the usual £16. It was quite a cold day when we visited, so we stuck to the state rooms and other parts of the house's interior. It is quite a vast estate and the signs didn't seem to be the most helpul in getting you from place to place. We did have a free audio tour and I suspect if we had followed it more closely, navigation around might have been a little less haphazard. We had lunch at the cafe and stayed until about 4.30pm when everything was starting to pack up. The wind had picked up quite a bit by this point and had blown a few of the trees outside the orangery over. The gardens looked nice from inside and I think it will be well worth a visit another (warmer) time.

This week after sorting the house out, we had a day out and about around the capital so I've added a few more of the usual sites, Tower Bridge etc, into a new album.

We were there until dark but some of the lights on Tower Bridge didn't seem to be working. London Bridge was lit up in bright orange though which I don't think we've seen before. I think I'll leave it there for now. Cheerio ta ta!

Ok so this won't mean anything to a lot of my readers but I'll go ahead anyway. Some of you (with your fancy high resolution monitors) might notice the website has changed a little as might those people still using Internet Explorer rather than firefox, as for everyone else if I've done this properly you shouldn't really notice a thing!

I've switched from using HTML frames to a CSS layout. What does this mean to you I hear you call? Well frankly not a lot -  but I like it. It does mean I don't have any of the left over problems  with users navigating directly here from Google (That is if I ever get listed again!). It should also mean that if anyone wanted they could send the current page url to a friend - and everything should load properly. And finally I sorted out a lot of the issues with Internet Explorer - people still using it should now see a nice little background picture - now wasn't that worth all the trouble?

OK enough of the geek. The snow did come on the weekend as I had wished for - unfortunately the timing still didnt work out too well for me. Snow and Friday night traffic apparently don't mix well, aside from that I was too poorly to go play :-(

So I finish here by asking Jack Frost please give it another go - but perhaps give me a week to recover from this cold and then I'll be ready!

We had another busy day today on the storage project. We started off early at B&Q again getting some more wood cut. We had MDF cut for the doors and also some MDF sheets to make a shelf across the sop of the units. The shelf had been a last minute addition to the project, it had the benefit of adding a new place for the many books we have, and the added benefit of bringing the height of the sides down to a point where we could fit 4 to a sheet.

 

After a productive morning at B&Q, we set to work. We made ourself a jig to help us with cutting the holes for the hinges. It's the first time we've used cabinet hinges in one of our projects and we were a bit anxious about getting it right. We started by making a demo up on some MDF offcuts and then when we were happy with it, we turned the demo into a jig. With the template in place, we got the hinge sockets drilled quickly and then spent the rest of the day getting these fitted onto the units. Although the whole unit has to come apart again for painting, we wanted to check and see the doors would all fit as planned and get the holes in place, so we don't have to ruin any painted surfaces later. 

The hinges ended up being so much simpler than we had anticipated and by the time we had finished the day, all doors were in place, perfectly aligned and part of the shelf was measured up.