I didn’t set out to have three drills…

The posh one, a nice DIY model from DeWALT, was bought because both the batteries for my previous drill failed at the same time, after lying idle in their case for nearly a year… My fault. So, with lockdown looming, we dashed out to Wickes in Morecambe and got a new one.

Portable drills have come a long way from the early ‘Black and Decker’ days. Just pressing the trigger on this one and hearing that incredibly potent zzzsweeeesh gives me a rush. I’m a bit odd, Bernie says. But she loves the results.

There’s something about the relationship between man and drill… Women and drills, too, as a growing number of ladies are focussed and proficient DIYers.

You can do with a drill. You can do amazing things that a Leonardo da Vinci could never have envisaged. A simple spinning piece of metal – in various forms – together with that triumph of engineering – the modern screw – can perform miracles… and even transform an interior as hostile as The Saltpetre: Salty Pete’ as we have affectionately come to call it.

My developing man-cave, is definitely a ‘he’, I thought, that bright morning after the bonfire of Peter’s Pride.

For two hours, and wearing an essential dust mask, I had swept out the cobbles along the entire left side of the emerging space with an industrial brush: squares 1-19 if you’re following this on our ‘lucky bag’ square diagram, above. I dumped the resulting buckets of the black dirt on the compost heap in the lower level of the garden – the ‘U’ shape that used to be the canal basin.

I came back to take a deep breath and surveyed the long and narrow corridor in which I intended to construct the first section of our storage – and the new life of Salty Pete.

The requirements were simple: I needed space and functionality for gardening tools, woodworking tools, a woodworking bench (to be made as part of the project), decorating storage, general tools – car, bikes, motorbike and the like.

I also needed space for four pedal bikes. Before getting our Collie dog, we were passionate cyclists – often taking our summer holidays as cycling trips to France, Italy and Croatia. We have Brompton folding bikes, too, so the bike storage was going to have to be cleverly planned.

Then, lawnmowers… three of them. One is my beloved Honda, bought as the main machine for the Wharf’s large lawns. It’s large but not a ‘sit-on’, as I’d kill myself on the slopes that run down to the old canal bed – see photo below.

Another is the mower from the previous house, which makes a good standby in the event of the primary being serviced. The third is not actually a mower, it’s a petrol-driven scarifier. Used only a few times a year, it saves days of raking and is an essential tool to get air into the soil and eradicate the winter moss. Lakeland’s wet winters make much moss…

There were other, smaller, categories, but each one was important in its own right. Liquid storage, for example. We needed a whole shelf system, at low level – because liquid is heavy – just to cope with two and four-stroke petrol for the strimmer and lawnmowers, white spirit and rubbing alcohol and the like.

Most of these things come in multi-gallon containers that are useful but take up a lot of space. They are also difficult to move around, so this part of the storage had to be close to Salty Pete’s door.

Bernie’s words rang in my ears… “Well, how about not spending any money at all?” It had seemed a fun challenge at the time, but fulfilling the above list of requirements without buying anything new was going take ingenuity… and saws.

Saws are almost as useful as drills. I knew I had a plethora of hand saws… somewhere. My parents spent half their working lives running a greengrocer’s shop along one of the busiest arterial roads in Bolton. When Morrisons supermarket demolished the old factory opposite to build their new superstore, the days of their business were numbered. Mum was near to retirement age and had every intention of, as she put it, ‘not freezing her fingers off, every winter’. Dad didn’t want to stop selling things… he liked it. So he switched the shop’s remit be a to a general gift, handy things and tools shop.

Every birthday and Christmas, I’d be given something new with which to re-model the physical world. He was much better at engineering than I was – he’d been an aircraft factory fitter at the local De Havilland factory in his youth. I think he felt that his love and gifting of tools would result in me getting better at using them… Hmmm.

I knew that Salty Pete contained a lot of these tool presents… I just wasn’t sure where. The one thing I had found was the mitre saw. Old by today’s standards, it was clunky and very heavy. But its motor was as strong as an ox. After much physical exertion and grunting, I had dug it out of one of Salty Pete’s corners the day before, before remembering, with sadness that it was broken. The blade had started making noises because it was slowly working its way off the shaft that should have held it rigid. I’d taken a cursory glance at it – even taken it apart – but, when I tried to bolt the deadly blade back in place, it wouldn’t tighten.

It was a shame, because, in its day, I had used it more than anything else he ever bought me (apart from my first motorbike, but that’s another story…) Reluctantly, I took it around to the ‘crash and burn’ tip behind Salty Pete at close of business that day.

But then I had the dream… and in the dream the axle for the blade had a black line along its length. Waking, I remembered the dream, but none of the details. But, sipping my tea, I got a flash of that black line… and knew what to do to fix it. I walked with confidence to the ‘tip’ behind the shed and retrieved it from the old bin. With a small toolkit in hand, I laid it at an angle on the grass to test my theory. Sure enough, the cutting blade was ‘keyed’ and had to be re-fitted along a line that would allow it to sink deeper towards the base of the shaft.

Five minutes later, I had a mitre saw, again, zinging like it was new… and Dad was smiling from somewhere… I know he was.

A mitre saw is wonderful and deadly. The rules are simple: if you’re wearing armoured clothing, including gloves, you can instantly cut anything wooden or plastic that will fit into its jaws..

There were a few sections of pallets that needed the mitre saw treatment, and the clock was ticking.

Sitting on the box, looking at the now plain walls of the left edge of Salty Pete, I knew I needed a ‘quick win’. Two hours from now, our lockdown ‘working day’ would be ending. Bernie would return with the final mug of tea, and I didn’t want the wow factor to fade. Apart from anything else, the emotional effect of getting a pat on the back was of critical importance at this stage of such a big project, with so little to see so far, apart from tearing things down.

One of the raw materials I had plenty of was a pile of well-used pallets on which various gardening deliveries had been dropped off by brave lorry drivers, at the end of our narrow and long lane. The key to their usefulness lay in something that Bernie had said when she started her horticulture course in Penrith–back in 2013.

“Pallets…” She said, arriving home at the end of her first day to lavish attention from me and the Collie dog. “Are magic! Cut them to size and stick the handles of spades into them, with a twist.”

It took me a while to grasp it. In fact, it was only sitting there on my box with cold tea that triggered the need to make it work. But it did… I fired up the mitre saw and grabbed a hand tool or two for the difficult bits… Oh, and the two drills. I forgot to explain why I have three. Better leave that for next time as the hour is late…

I had two hours to get something useful on that wall. I had a working, if ancient, mitre saw. And drills… and those wonderful long screws that will just about join anything to anything else.

The revealed wall behind Peter’s Pride was already battened… That, alone, would save me hours of work. I dragged the best three of the pallets to the saw. Then, like some desperado, I set up the two drills; one with a long narrow bit to cut the pilot holes, and the other to fix the chopped and chosen pallet to the internal skeleton of Salty Pete with a triumph of gusto over accuracy.

It worked.

Two hours later, I wheeled the motorbike and large mower back into Salty Pete, looking for all the world as though I had been through another day of drudge. Bernie was coming up the drive with that final mug of tea.

“Better call it a day,” she said, consolingly, “Another one tomorrow… make more progress, then”

I nodded, taking the tea, gratefully, and looking over her shoulder to what she hadn’t yet seen.

“Push and twist… the handles?” I asked, cryptically.

She turned, then smiled. It was a moment I will remember for a long time.

“Oh, yes!”

Salty Pete now contained an organised storage system for our long-handles garden tools. Squares 1 and 14. Something was real. Something was done… and it hadn’t cost a penny.

To be continued…

Other parts of the Locked Down and Armed series:

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, this is Part Four

©Copyright Stephen Tanham

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.