You’re going to build a what???

A little more progress on the house this week, finally finished stripping all the old rust and paint off with the help of my friend Pinky who comes and helps when she has some spare time.

Now my angle grinder’s quite old, it belonged to my grandfather but, being a Makita, it just keeps going. However, it doesn’t have a safety guard and it’s smaller than the current ’standard’. The wire brush I had bought didn’t fit. I have the use of my friend Benjy’s grinder but the switch doesn’t stay on, which leads to a very sore thumb after a while trying to hold it, particularly when doing a job as big as the trailer.

I looked around for a new wheel for my grinder but couldn’t find anyone doing them in the smaller size at anything like a reasonable price. Then a helpful coincidence arose, each week I get the special offer emails from Aldi and Lidl, two discount supermarkets here in the UK, and last week Aldi had a heavy duty angle grinder for £15, less than the cost of a new wheel for the other grinder. Couldn’t resist that and so I have a new best friend for trailer prep.

However, you do have to watch cheap things sometimes. The grinder, which appears solid and powerful also came with a couple of diamond cutting disks which I thought would be just the thing for removing the old mudguard supports which I won’t be using. It didn’t take long before I discovered that while the grinder might be a great piece of kit, the disks were actually anything but!

The regular cutting disks made short work of the mounts and I have learned to be careful of diamond disks, at least cheap ones. So, there followed some grinding and the rapid removal of much old paint and rust. However, it also wore out the wire wheel quite rapidly given that I could easily spend an hour or more solidly working away quite happily. In short order I needed another wheel. You can see the old and the new wheels below. I try and get the most out of any consumable and this was no different.

It wasn’t a fun job, being damned awkward in places lying underneath the frame with a wire wheel going hell for leather a few inches from your face while you get at all the really innaccessible bits of the chassis, but at least it’s been done properly and, apart from the bits that need welding, I know it’s finished and should last a good long while now. It’s all been primed and half’s been topcoated. I just need to put the finish top coat on the final half, but rain prevented that on Wednesday. I did score another good deal though on the top coat paint. I had planned to use hammerite, but that’s £20 a litre and I reckoned I’d need two liters to do all of it. Then the Lidl email letter came in with an offer on a different brand of anti-rust metal paint, so straight down I went and secured 3 liters for the princely sum of £12. Bargain.

In the meantime I’ve decided that I reckon I can do without a gas water heater and go with the solar panel instead, so I’ve been on a steep learning curve to understand how solar hot water systems are designed and installed. I reckon I can do that, what could possibly go wrong?

Peace, out.

You’d think I’d be using a computer for this, being a bit of a geek, but for planning layouts I’m old fashioned and still prefer to use graph paper and a pencil. I haven’t found a program that’s as easy to use as paper and pen for drawing up and playing with framing/floorplans, so today my desk was covered in sheets of paper while I figured out the best way to frame up the house.

I need to get the framing plan done so that I can work out how much lumber I need to actually order. Normally I just sit and figure it out as I go along but that won’t really work here, plus I’ll save money and hassle by getting it all in one go and having it delivered. So, I have the plan pretty much finished, I just need to futz with the roof framing a little and I’ll be ready to order.

This lot should be everything I need to get the walls and roof done, so it’ll make a big change to what’s been happening so far.

Cheers, J.

Last week my lovely friend Pinky came over to spend the day working on the trailer with me. We both came armed with angle grinders and spent a very happy afternoon cutting bits of unneeded trailer away, grinding sections back to flat and finally using my new best friend the wire brush wheel to strip off all the old paint and rust.

The wire wheel leaves a lovely burnished look to the steel frame which it seems a shame to paint over, but rust doesn’t care for looks and so a thick coat of rust-killing, undercoat was applied generously.

We found a couple of small areas of rust that will need patching, but they’re minor and a simple plate welded over the area will suffice. Next week will be devoted to getting the rest of the trailer finished to the point where only the main welding is left, for which I have to wait for my brother to get some time off work.

In the mean-time, I’ve been working on the framing plan, which is complete except for the roof. I’ll be heading down to the local Jewson branch this week too, so that I can order and pay for the 2×4’s and osb sheets which they’ll deliver for a very reasonable £15 charge. Then it will be stacking that lot away under a tarp and getting on with building the floor and wall frames. I can do that before the trailer’s welded up, but I just can fix them in place. Still, should mean a load of fun construction that will quickly become house shaped once I’m ready to build.

Here’s hoping the weather stays fine this week.

J.