before and after #9

Saturday, 26 July 2008

The problem with documenting your life (at least visually) with only before and after photos is that it requires a fair bit of foresight.  Unfortunately I've not always got the wherewithall to realise that I need to take a photo before anything has happened.  My struggles to keep us all entertained aside here's a recent craft project - if you are wondering what is actually going on here - I used a toy catalog, some glass beads, magnets and glue to make some cool fridge magnets for the kids.   In the last few days I've gotten to do a few projects actually - from covering our noticeboard with retro-ish fabric, to hack-sawing a metal strip between two doors, to re-organising the pantry, to woodshopping some pelmets (one down, one to go) to doing a little bit of concreteing. This last activity was quite exciting - as a result of the recent roller-door removal and window-sliding door installation, we were left with a strip (approx 3cm x 3cm x 4metres) in the concrete floor which needed to be filled before we could tile over it.  I went out and bought a 20kg bag of concrete powder.   The instructions said to use 5 litres of water per 20kg of powder and I had guessed that my gap to be filled was the equivalent of about 5 litres in volume). Therefore by my calculations I needed to mix the whole bag.  Of course what I needed to mix up was about three kilos of powder and what I did mix up would have filled a small swimming pool  - and it's not like I could pour the excess down the sink. If there had been any candidates for cement boots around I could have just asked them to step into my (very large) bucket  - but instead I had to pour the leftover mix into supermarket bags - which of course have holes in them... you can imagine the rest.    Still - the floor looks great now - the next exciting thing to happen in the garage come games-room will be the carpet in a few weeks time.

So if  you're wondering how I found the time to mix up enough concrete to pour a multi-level carpark - it's because there's been a halt to production of Pixel Pinkie Series Two due to some contract wrangling in the State Government. As a result all us staff were given an unpaid holiday until further notice. Some people had only been back at work for 3 days before this happened.  I'm lucky as I have another income (jon's) that I can spend on my days off so I'm not too fussed as long as we do get to go back to work soon. I'm sure it's a lot  harder for most of the other crew.