So, now we’ve got to move swiftly!

I see you’re willing and able, You have your faded work- jeans on and you can borrow my older safety helmet. It’s a bit squeaky, but perfectly functional. We have two hours to paint Salty Pete between squares 1 and 19. See the ‘Lucky Bag’ diagram, below .

During the last hour before you arrived, I’ve been stirring this huge pot of white emulsion paint – essentially, bringing it back to life from ten years ago. I’m as surprised as you are that it worked… and it’s free, of course. If we use it up – which is unlikely – there’s another, identical tub sitting in the darkness close to where the rat was last seen…

‘Roddy’ – Salty Pete’s newly-named resident rat – has not been seen since our fateful meeting in the dark and dingy recess under the old vice. I have to say, we must have been feeding him well because his coat and eyes gleamed with health. I’m not entirely happy with his (or her?) presence. How do you ‘sex’ a rat? Very carefully, I imagine, especially a wild one, living in your future man-cave.

I decant the first measure of thick, white paint into two old mugs and hand you a medium sized brush. We set to… The brief is to paint everything above waist level that is wood and connected to the old stone – with the exception of the now-completed garden tools racks, made from the old pallets. The contrast of aged wood and white will look good.

I’m after a cheap effect; what Bernie and I once named ‘North California Shabby Chic’. In the 1990s we spent many weekends motoring along the Pacific Coast Highway (also known as PCH and Highway 1) and further north, following the roads as far as the stunning Oregon coast. The computer-based world we worked in was centred on technology from one of the Silicon Valley companies, and we took every opportunity to tag a few days’ adventure onto each of our quarterly business trips.

North of San Francisco, it’s quite sparsely populated. You can drive for hours before finding that much-desired cafe, tucked away down a backroad. When you do, there’s a good chance that the decor will be ‘North California Shabby Chic’. This consists of rapidly-applied rough strokes of thick, white emulsion, resulting in a rich coat of white, underpinned by occasional glimpses of the wood beneath. It doesn’t come into its own until you put colourful things on it, of course…

It’s easy, error-proof and fast. It doesn’t matter what else you paint in the process because it can all go in the mix. We’re talking casual painting – a style to go with the organic nature of our restoration of Salty Pete… It’s also fun, and we’ll end up spattered with white. But your old jeans and my old jeans have seen it all before.

Music… we’ll need music. So here is one of my favourite Jackson Browne tracks to keep us rhythmic and motivated.

Off we go…

Two hours later, singing and, occasionally, giggling, we have finished. Our arms ache with the constant brush strokes, and we’re a bit of a mess… But it’s been fun. Salty Pete – at least the wall between squares 1 and 19 – has been completely transformed.

One of the long sections of pegboard still has shelf supports fixed in place. They’re drilled into a batten that’s is fixed into the stone at the back, so they’re very solid. Not waiting for the paint to dry, I reach for the step ladders and try them for size. They hang, perfectly, leaving ample space, below, for other fittings to be attached. Doing this gives me an idea about the many bicycles…. but more on this, later.

“Suddenly, it’s bright!’ says Bernie, arriving with three mugs of steaming tea – we’ll have to be careful not to confuse the various mugs, going forward…

She examines what we’ve done… “North California Shabby Chic!” She says it with a chuckle. It’s all the approbation we could wish… The day has begun well, and it’s about to get better.

There’s one shelf I’m in a hurry to see dry. It’s right in the middle of the main section and I want it to be the home of a bluetooth-based portable speaker to which I can ‘beam’ music while we’re working in here. Having quality sound is a key step. I place an old tile beneath the speaker to protect it from the drying paint, and connect it up to the phone. The well-constructed cabinet space – a survivor from one of Peter’s radio shacks – makes its sound rich and resonant.

Above it are two more shelves. I put the large, outdoor extension leads into these, and the whole arrangement seems to snap into life. Directly above this are the twin feeds from the dual power sockets on the main beam, so we’ve aligned form with function.

Let’s bring it to life… Here’s an appropriate song from John Miles:

USOs… it’s not a typo. Unidentified Structural Objects… There are two of them; the smaller one, here, Square 11 – beneath the music and power shelf, and a bigger floor to ceiling one on the back wall, Square 19.

The smaller one, beneath the music shelf, is about the depth and height of a kitchen unit, which is why we placed a broken and surplus kitchen unit next to it, years ago. We had a vague plan to make it useful in the future and it currently houses chisels and an old jigsaw. The USO is made of pale brick and serves no visible purpose. Perhaps it supported something vital in Peter’s day?

Whatever it was, it’s about to become something new, for I can’t make progress along this most important of walls without resolving its use. It is too big and intrusive to ignore, and I’d just fall over if it stayed unchanged. So I have to make it part of something functional.

Thinking furiously, I assemble some bits… which turn out to be an inspired collection…

There’s a Black and Decker ‘workmate workbox’, a plastic tray, a pen and pencil drawer insert, two pieces of MDF – one raw, the other covered, a scrap halogen light fitting from my old office desk, and, finally, a small ‘modeller’s’ vice.

I push the old (and door-less) kitchen unit up snug to the USO. A short stride to the newly commissioned Drill Cabinet sees me equipped with two ready-charged drills – pilot drill and power screwdriver locked and loaded. Five minutes later, I’ve drilled the two pieces of MDF into place. In the process, the kitchen unit has been secured into the whole. I’m looking smug…

By some miracle of good fortune the white plastic tray fits snugly behind the MDF, tidying the gap to the wall. I place the pencil tray into its white brother and rotate the ‘workmate workbox’ into one of two orientations it will have, long-term.

Things are looking good. But this workplace will be used for detailed things, and I need the footless halogen light resolving…

The small vice comes into play: it fixes (at a right-angle to the usual orientation) to the music shelf, above. The arm of the broken halogen lamp is fastened, horizontally, so that the head can be rotated to the workbench, below, or just about anywhere else for contributory illumination.

Our working day is ending. I have one final thing to do. We have a plethora of old, plastic, petrol cans, and I suspect they’ll make useful storage – sawn in half. The first one is in the above photo, mounted on the pegboard. We’ll look at what it does, in the next post.

The left wall is looking purposeful. But behind me the central part of the floor is still chaotic. I will need a bold move for the next step, if I am not to continue to spend the start and end of each day carrying things out to the lawn and back again.

I stare up into the dusty heavens and wonder… dare we?

To be continued…

Other parts of the Locked Down and Armed series:

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

©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.

I didn’t explain about the three drills…

I’ve written about the new one – a slinky DeWALT with a noise that makes you shiver with DIYlight. The other two are older versions by the same maker.

Buying the new one was prompted by the failure of both my re-chargeable batteries, when I tried to use the drill after a year of idleness… So, technically, I had a spare drill – but I had purchased only one battery with the new device… Two drills, one battery…hmm.

Prior to the destruction of Salty Pete’s old interior (the ‘radio shacks’), I stored my personal protective gear – safety helmet, armoured gloves, eye-protectors, long waders for the pond, etc – in a large plastic box that was loosely jammed on to the main cross-member that supports the upper part of the building. The middle of the former Saltpetre was so cluttered that I needed somewhere with easy access to my most precious life-protecting gear. Being high above, I only had to arrange the pink ladder (more on this later) to access my essential gear.

Before I swung the sledgehammer at the entire left side of the interior, I shimmied up the ladder to retrieve the box before the start of armageddon. The box contained a surprise: all my expected stuff and, underneath, another drill case. It was old and dirty, but inside was a drill and two batteries… presumable dead ones.

In a state of disbelief, I did a quiet calculation on my fingers and realised I now had – at least potentially – three drills and three batteries – assuming the older ones worked.

It was too good to be true. Hardly daring to hope, I stretched a power line up to the only socket in the place and used a multi-plug to connect the two chargers. There was a satisfying clunk as the batteries dropped into the charger’s housing… and then both red lights began to blink, indicating they were charging. Disbelief… and a silent thank you to the fates.

Within a meagre half an hour, they were fully charged, tested and ready for action. Two of the drills were mine; the other was a mystery. Five years ago, we had some structural work done to create an interior loft within the Saltpetre; but no-one had contacted us about a lost drill case and contents.

I made a phone call to check. Nope… said the roofer and builder of lofts. The drill kit was not his…. A mystery; but in these circumstances, a delightful one. If anyone else who’d worked here came to mind, I’d come clean.

If not, I had three drills…each with a battery.

A drill saves hours of work, but what slows you down is having to change the ‘bit’ from, say, a thin pilot drill – used to make sure the final screw doesn’t split the wood, to a bit that functions as a powerful screwdriver – driving a long, high-tensile screw home in a few seconds, where it would have taken long minutes by hand. The small, dedicated ones are useful in a house, but, for serious stuff, get an adaptor for your drill…heaven!

The only reason the ‘long-handled garden tools rack’ had been finished in the short time available was the double-act of two drills, functioning as described, above.

The main problem when working on Salty Pete’s interior was the low level of light- there are no windows. When we bought The Wharf, ten years ago, there was no electric to the ‘shed’. While having the contours of the future garden carved out of the muddy building site, we had an armoured cable routed under what would become the main lawn. For the first few years, we survived off this, and the single plug near the door, barely visiting Salty Pete during the dark months. Eventually, we had a overhead set of sockets and a strip light put in, but the light was in the wrong place – on the side of the lintel and not its lower face, where it would light up the intended (future) workbench, below.

I was going to need a lot of light for some of the work I had planned, so I disconnected the fuse, then the light-fitting, before stretching the existing cable to allow for it to be mounted directly over the central part of the building. The spring days were bright, but that little extra from the overhead helped a lot.

Having relocated the main light, I took stock of what the rest of the day might contain. There was another ‘easy win’ for Square 14: an object that would add both hand-tools and liquid storage beneath the long-handled tools rack. For years it had served as a shelving unit in the larder of our former house. It was made wholly of plastic and I hated it… But it was free.

The plastic shelf was too tall. The top of this unit had to be level with the base of the tools above it. A hand saw made short work of the adjustment in height. Minutes later, minus its top shelf, it was functioning as a container for the petrol, two-stroke, white spirit, turps and various other liquids that normally take up flow-through space on a garage floor.

The new structure was beginning to emerge within the dusty cube of the Saltpetre. Its functions and forms were nascent in what was included and excluded so far. This wall was to be dedicated to garden tools and liquids at one end; and ‘tall power tools’ at the other, with drills taking a central place in the middle. The ‘tall power tools’ had no common home at present and were a damned nuisance. Incorporating them into the wall would free up much of the floor and provide a wonderful feeling of walkable space.

I was starting to realise that this was not just a physical journey, but a psychological one, as well. Much of my personal past was being confronted, here… Contradictions have a habit of being exposed in such a process.

Enter contradiction…

It’s about four feet tall, garish red with grey trim, and had large castor wheels. It’s all plastic, and often bends in all the wrong places. It’s useless and Bernie couldn’t wait to get rid of it!

It’s a tool chest – but was never strong enough to do its job. I used it for years in my office–but not for anything heavy. Since then, it had mouldered at the back of Salty Pete, buried under a mountain of other, unlikely-to-be-reused stuff.

But my ‘gift from above’ drills were sitting, quite nicely, on it. Moreover, it could be rotated into the corner of Square 6, where it would take up the minimum room and not block access to the ‘long power tools’ that had to live on the adjacent and recessed Square 19. Reluctantly, I could see the potential for it to be dedicated solely to the drill-related part of my hardware. And I had just redeemed and re-used Bernie’s nasty plastic shelves. According to the verdict accompanying the last mug of tea, she was ‘well pleased!’

There was a trade, here… And I knew just how to sweeten the deal. On her last mercy mission with the tea, Bernie had remarked that it was a pity that we couldn’t re-use the severed top of the plastic shelves. Two drills at the ready, and armed with my large plastic jar of may-come-in-handy bits, I fixed the old top, vertically to the side of the renewed liquids rack and, using long screws, locked it tightly in six places against the verticals of the shelving. The hard ‘webbed’ surface was perfect for the use of plastic ties. A short time later, we had a place where shorter garden tools could be slipped into strong plastic loops and tightened… all made from scrap pieces of plastic and large-packet Amazon wrapping.

Returning to the other side of the left wall, there was a problem with the tool cabinet’s feet – four large castor wheels, allowing it to be pushed around on a hard level floor. But on cobbles from 1820! Even Hercules would shudder… Removing the wheels was a matter of sliding the casings out of the ‘loose from new’ plastic housings. I put the heavy castors to one side. They were the best made part of the cabinet and would possibly come in handy within the house. Wheel-less, it stood more firmly on the ever-present, ever uneven cobbles.

“If it were snowing, we could tow it away on a sleigh,” I heard myself mutter. And then thought about what I’d said. Flat runners would at least average out the effects of the cobbles. I scrambled to retrieve two lengths of scrap wood and one of Peter’s old jam jars in which he had stored a selection of basic washers. The cabinet’s plastic was flimsy, but I suspected that the right fat-screw and washer combination would fix it to anything below. I could drill through the cabinet anywhere I liked, there was no strength in any of it…

I examined the interior of the cabinet to check where the structure was weakest. Pulling my head back to the daylight, I noticed that two of the older timber battens ran down the wall at the back.

Thirty minutes later, the ugly red box was not only secure, it was drilled and screwed so tightly into what was around it that it had become an integral part of Salty Pete’s structure. I grunted in triumph. I wasn’t just remodelling the interior, I was building a Favela!

Keen to keep the momentum going, I located everything I could find related to my drills: bits galore (thank you, Dad), plastic plugs of all sizes, the lot. I stuffed them all into their new home, with the twin drills on top and… and stood back; looking from garden tools, across the expanse of the left wall to the new, bright red, ‘drill station’.

It felt really good, until I focussed on the actual wall between these twin triumphs. Before me was a patchwork of ancient red pegboard, slotted-in timbers for support, and a wealth of old MDF pieces to fill the gaps. Each was a different colour. The effect wasn’t vital, it was ‘dead’ and old… Whatever happened next with that important central section, I didn’t want it backed by such a sad base…

We needed a break from the past, and colour was the most powerful technique I knew. But the spirit of the project was to do it by re-use and upcycling–spending no additional money in the process.

I knew that, in the back of one of the nastiest corners of the building, (Square 5 on our map) buried beneath a pile of other things – including our ‘bagged’ Brompton folding cycles, were two ten litre plastic drums of white emulsion paint. They had been left over from decorating the house when it was finally complete, back in 2012. I doubted they would still be usable… But they were the best chance I had of changing the ‘feel’ of Salty Pete… without spending a penny!

But, first, I had to dig my way to them…

Twenty minutes later, sweating profusely with the effort of shifting enough stuff to get in there, I located them in the near darkness. They were as far back as they could be, and against the old stone of the back wall. As I inched towards them, I looked sideways, for motivation, at the shining red side of my new ‘Drill Station’…. and saw the remarkable blue eyes of a large rat looking back at me…

To be continued…

Other parts of the Locked Down and Armed series:

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

©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.