View from inside the tree top hide I'm currently sitting in waiting for some Badgers to turn up.. No guarantee I'll get a decent image but I've scattered some food under the light next to the sett so fingers crossed.
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Slug n Moss
I was wondering what to photograph on this dull wet day and then along came a slug on this huge bed of moss..
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Home for the next two nights in exchange for photographing activities on and around…
Home for the next two nights in exchange for photographing activities on and around Nannerth Farm near Rhayader, Wales.
All I need now is for the rain to stop 
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The Secret Gardens of Oxton
Wooden carving in secret garden
The Secret Gardens of Oxton is an annual event held, unsurprisingly, in the village of Oxton, Birkenhead. The event began as a fund raising exercise in 2001 to help raise money for some Christmas lights with which to adorn the main street running through the village. The event is fairly well attended drawing crowds from all over the Wirral and possibly even further.
For the locals, like us, it is a good way to see what many other people in the area have been up to in their gardens over the previous year, steal all the good ideas and apply them, where appropriate, to our own gardens. Once all the information gathering has been completed we usually head for the Shrewsbury Arms to meet up with all our friends and enjoy a drink or three.
I don’t think we have ever visited every available garden because we invariably meet people we haven’t seen for a while and have lengthy catch up conversations and we often lose members of our group and so head for the one place we know we will eventually find them, the pub.
This year however, we didn’t get to the pub as we didn’t see any of our usual crowd sitting outside in the beer terrace when we went past the pub, so we ended up going for a cup of tea and a cake instead and hit the wine later on when we got home.
Didn’t take many images on the day so for the really curious here’s a link to last years gallery on the Oxton Society Website – Secret Gardens 2011 Gallery
Lots of people enjoying tea and cake instead of beer and wine
My wife after two bottles of strong red wine
Taken with HTC One X using camera 360 funny effect.. and yes she probably will kill me for posting this
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Cupboardy
I fully intended to finish off the plastering this weekend, and even though the first half of the morning was taken up with our weekly shopping trip, I still entered the lounge after lunch with plastering on my mind, but somehow I ended up building the beginnings of a small gas meter/ electrics cupboard instead.
For a long time now the mass of wires and cables behind our TV had regularly irritated me, as I have to admit I do have a slightly anal obsession with tidiness, so I’d already decided to dismantle the existing plywood box that contained the gas meter* and build a cupboard that would also contain the power outlets for the TV, Router, Tivo box etc..
*For some reason, probably because it was the cheapest option, the previous builders had positioned the gas meter in the lounge behind the TV, nice bit of planning there!
Before I could do any plastering I had to cut out for the new sockets and cabling and it was whilst I was doing this that I figured it would just be easier just to build the cupboard than attempt to plaster that area of the room. Fortunately I had a load of bits and pieces of timber from previous projects so managed to find enough materials to keep me busy for the rest of the day and make a good start getting the cupboard built.
I think I spent about six or seven hours working today, but I reckon if you add up all the time I spent digging through the contents of our trailer looking for timber, travelling back and forth to the garden shed every time I needed yet another tool or packet of screws and even more time spent looking for tools which two minutes earlier I had actually been using!, then probably about half that time was actual work!
Won’t be making much progress tomorrow either as its the annual ‘Secret Gardens of Oxton’ event. But more of that in my next post..
Time for a hot shower and a cold glass of wine.. not both at the same time obviously 
Cupboardy area before I started today's work
The result of my days labour.. sometimes these things just take time!
Categories: Do It Yourself
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DIY Chronicles – back to its roots!
When I started this site I intended it to be a bit of a diary recording mostly my often haphazard adventures in the field of DIY and occasionally my even more haphazard adventures on my bike, but then along came Google +
Since Google + came on line I have become slightly obsessed with my photography, as demonstrated by the ratio of 160 photo posts to 8 DIY posts, so I thought it was about time I got back on track.
Fortunately Barbie Builder must have been thinking the same thing as she decided enough time had passed since finishing off the ‘Very Long Term basement Project‘ and it was high time the Lounge got its long awaited make over.
To be fair it had been some time since the room had last been redecorated and the carpet had been down for around 20 years, but, to my obviously untrained male eye, it looked perfectly fine. However the sharp eye of Barbie Builder saw things differently!
Still being somewhat jaded by the impact of the basement project I hadn’t really wanted to get involved in another large scale job, but Barbie assured me this would just be a quick make over. So we decided we would just remove the Hessian paper from the fire place, owing to the cats using it as a scratching post, paint over the existing paper and get somebody in to lay the new laminate flooring.
But then..
We decided to remove the original 13” high skirting boards so that we could refit new boards over the laminate instead of the usual beading. As the highest new skirting you can buy is only 9” this has left a 4” gap all around the room which will need to be plastered up so the joint doesn’t show behind the new wallpaper.
We also decided it would be a better job to remove all the old wallpaper. This became a nightmare until we bought a steam paper stripper, but unfortunately this approach blew out a lot of the old plaster, which has led to the need for even more re-plastering. We also decided along the way to get rid of the old gas fire, seal up the fire place with marble effect boards and rewire all the sockets in the corner where the television, tivo and router are situated, into a newly built cupboard..
Currently I’m halfway through the re-plastering!
A short time after the work broke out!
Sometimes you just can't help but join in
Whilst trying to capture some images for a 'Social Documentary Photo Comp' I've ended up having a couple of unexpected debates about the 'Threat of Terrorism' and been asked to "stop using my phone inappropriately" over the PA system of a local railway station. Ironically I didn't get into trouble for this one!
In album Street Photography (1 photo)
Official Street Photographers
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