Selfsufficientish.com

We have a lot of stuff , although whether it's hoarding or not is a bit of a grey area as far as I'm concerned. My father worked at a council tip and pretty much every day brought something home. Often it was scrap metal but there was a lot of other things too , bikes , mowers and vacuums we had in ...

For my degree I designed this: https://thealveus.blogspot.com/2012/08/so-what-am-i-alveus-is-rain-water.html Designed to collect water where there isn’t a suitable downpipe. I even made a prototype out of an old piece of land drain and an umbrella. Sadly it blew over in the rain. I like the design ...

I've had to remove a couple of decks in the past for customers. Common construction seems to be to concrete vertical posts into the ground with the framework on top of those. This does mean there are some pretty large lumps of concrete that come out. One had the ground covered in rubble , broken bri...

I've had my share of plastic buckets falling apart. Mostly they are reused and have formally contained paint , tile adhesive , lime putty and the like and are aquired through work but as pointed out whether single or multiuser they are still plastic. Awkward thing really is with a lot of paints bein...

I use an old floor scraper , just like a wide sharp hoe really , saves bending down .

It should be possible to construct a frame out of roofing lath and plastic sheeting to be temporarily erected say at night to collect rain. Obviously you'd need a butt and then say two frames perhaps 6'x3' preferably hinged together and covered in plastic. Couple of posts to hang it off so it's abov...

Another stately home I worked at that needed a bit of de cluttering was Cauke Abbey in Derbyshire . We were told that the former residents used a few rooms until the deteriorating roof started to leak and then just left everything and moved onto other rooms. It didn't help that owners in the past ha...

One incident at work always sticks in my mind. We were working on some stately home or another when the architect says to us " you must all be very happy to work on places like these , buildings that are your heritage " . One old boy I was working with turned to the architect and replied " this isn'...

Touched on this subject down the pub last night with a few friends . Ina's idea of cutting worn sheets in half and sewing back together got a few laughs as they couldn't believe anyone would do such a thing and then another laugh when I said it seemed an good enough idea. We then got on to tidying u...

Houses as landfill! Just down the road is (was) a row of 10 1950's 2 bedroom cottages; timber framed, corrugated iron roof, brick chimney and fibro cement clad. The cladding contained asbestos which was duly removed and packaged by specialists and the cottages industrially vacuumed to remove any po...

in a few days the window they are on will change from a single to a double glazed one so this time next year it should be warmer there . I may have to repeat this little experiment just to see if there's any change .

Is that the same Blackout that was made into a tv film shown on channel. 4 ( I think) ? Recently my daughter (13) was talking about minimalism and how she likes the idea although looking at her bedroom at times one could be forgiven for disbelieving her. We looked at images on the internet and I was...

Agreed that sort of thing shouldn't be encouraged even if it can't be banned outright. I do have a couple of examples where clearances have worked the other way. After early retirement my father worked with a friend of his who had a contract to clear a couple of offices . The deal was to clear every...

Final update before the plants head for the compost heap. It was an interesting exercise if nothing else. The one plant has managed to produce a single pepper around two inches long. It's currently a patchy red and green colour. The other plant flowered again over Christmas but nothing came of that ...

Some time ago we had to clear my wife's nan's house. Only a small terrace house but on the west coast of Scotland while we live in Staffordshire . We went up in my van and her brother in law hired a van and came too. Some things were given away to nan's friends , a fair bit was dumped ( old worn out...