WFH

My job isn’t one you can do from home, so while the rest of the world has spent the last few years abandoning the office, I’ve still been turning up in person like some sort of mug.

The other day I had the opportunity to spend a day working from home, and grabbed it with both hands. I had lots of project work to do and none of it required me to be in the building: I had some training videos that needed voiceovers recording, I had documentation to write and I had some development work to do on some internal web tools I wrote. So on Friday I fired up a work laptop at home and got stuck in.

Not only did I get more sleep and avoid the time and cost of about 3½ hours of commuting, I also got loads done. Here is a summary of how I spent my ten hour shift.

Activity	Duration
Attend morning meeting for WFH staff through my phone because the laptop wasn’t logged in yet	0h 30m
Struggle to get the work laptop to connect to my home wifi and talk to IT support about proxy settings	0h 45m
Check emails	0h 10m
Make coffee, get distracted by arrival of post	0h 10m
Open training slides in Powerpoint, set up USB microphone and headphones, test setup, get distracted and read news articles on the Guardian website	1h
Do Guardian Quick Crossword #16972	0h 15m
Start recording voiceover, discover time limit on Powerpoint recordings, search for alternative screen recording software, install on work laptop	0h 25m
Dog arrives in room, play with dog	0h 30m
See message on phone, reply to message, see notification on Reddit, scroll through Reddit	0h 20m
Break for lunch	1h
Unlock laptop, set Teams status to “available”; toilet break	0h 10m
Start recording voiceover with new software, get lost on complex slide animation twenty minutes in, discover there is no edit feature, resign self to having to start recording again, become despondent about project, make tea, look at phone again for a bit	1h 30m
Let dog out for a wee, throw ball for dog which gets dog excited, dog spends extended period of time on very wet lawn, dog runs back inside and through house with muddy paws. Clean dog’s paws. Clean kitchen, dining room and hallway floors with Dettol wipes	0h 45m
See email from team leader asking how day is going, redraft reply eight times, eventually just say it’s going well thanks	0h 15m
Notice office-hours staff will be leaving work in 15 minutes, write email asking complex question about SQL database backups for web app that I need to work on, send email slightly too late for it to be seen or dealt with before Monday	0h 30m
Rehearse complex slide animation that tripped me up before, change animation after rehearsal, fail to rehearse new animation sequence	0h 30m
Make tea, get distracted by dog, play with dog	0h 30m
Start recording voiceover, get lost on changed animation sequence twenty minutes in, plough on anyway since interest in project is now waning, continue to end of recording	0h 40m
Discover freeware screen recording software has recorded in some random format to some place in the cloud, attempt to download and convert this to something useful	0h 20m
Send email to team leaders shared inbox about something unrelated to today’s work to prove I am still online at the end of my shift	0h 5m
Log off	0h 5m

Everybody has a house now

We have reached a momentous landmark in the life and times of the Beans Massive, which is that all of us – every single Bean – now owns a house.

To commemorate this occasion, I have had three beautiful portraits specially commissioned, that each recreate the atmosphere and excitement on the day we moved in to our houses.

Please enjoy these fine works of art. If you would like the original to frame and hang over your fireplace, get in touch and we can discuss terms.

Tile Saga: dénouement

Time to wrap up this saga. The tiling is complete, at least until I get round to starting the other bit of tiling around the worktop at the other side of the utility room.

Here’s the epilogue, expressed in short form because life is short:

Grouting is great. Tiling was a pain in the backside but I could spend a lot of time grouting. It’s not difficult and the results are instantly gratifying. Slopping grout into all the gaps covers a multitude of sins, instantly makes your tiles look good, and ten minutes later you wipe off the excess with a damp sponge and the job is done. All DIY should be like this.
Silicone sealant can mack right off. I’ve dabbled in this before, and hated it. Now I’ve done it more extensively to finish this tiling job and I hate it even more.
I haven’t yet sealed one side where the tiles meet the back wall of the room, because I put super gentle non-peel expensive Frog Tape on the wall to protect it from the grout and when I carefully peeled it off according to the instructions the super gentle non-peel expensive Frog Tape took all the paint off the wall, which I only painted a couple of months ago. So now I have to repaint that part before I can put a line of sealant there.

Now I get to move on to another job, and commence Raised Bed and Gravel Path Saga. Watch out for this year’s longest and most self-pitying read, coming to a Beans near you this autumn.

Tile saga

Would you like to have a go at tiling? You should try it, it’s very satisfying. The only thing you need to consider is that your first project should start off small so you can get the hang of it.

Our utility room has a toilet and a tiny microsink, but the sink was on a painted wall so water would splash on the paint all the time. It needed some tiles. Do a bit of googling and the entire internet will tell you that tiling a splashback is one of the simplest jobs and a great way for a beginner to learn tiling. Great, I thought. I’ll do that then.

The project scope expanded a bit, so now we are tiling the wall around the sink, and the windowsill which didn’t have an actuall sill, and the wall beside the toilet because it’s just a big empty wall and it will look nice. No problem. Bigger than a splashback but that’s just more tiles to stick on, not more difficulty.

All of the above is incorrect. It turns out that I have selected the world’s most fiddly tiling job as my first foray into the world of tiling. This isn’t an easy beginner’s introduction. It is a Tile Saga.

The sink is hard up against the side wall, so ideally would be removed so that the wall to the side and behind it could be tiled and the sink re-attached on top of the tiles. But it would have to be replaced slightly to the right, which is further than the pipes will reach, so it would all need re-plumbing, which I am not prepared to do.
Therefore the sink must stay in place and have tiles cut to go around it. But the sink is entirely curved – every part of it is curved, even across the top, where it could easily just be flat. So all the tiles around it must be cut with very specific and unique curves in them.
There are three pipes underneath and another pipe coming out of the side wall for the toilet cistern overflow. Tiles must be cut around these, requiring more curved cuts.
There’s no point getting an extremely expensive tile drill because they are for cutting circles in the middle of tiles, which I don’t need because all the pipes meet joints, and anyway the pipes are all different sizes and the curves are all unique and not even a consistent radius, so every curved cut needs to be done manually.
I have therefore invested in an angle grinder with a diamond cutting disc, which lets me cut very thin slices, and gentle curves, and notches out of tiles to go around the corners of the window. The angle grinder is the single most terrifying object I own because it cuts through ceramic tiles like soft butter and would remove fingers or even whole limbs if given half a chance. The tiles are small and must be held in place when you cut them so your fingers are very close to the blade. I am scared whenever I have to turn it on.
The angle grinder still cannot cut tight enough curves to get the pipework or the tighter sink edges right, so those bits must be manually filed out of the tiles using a file, which can take up to 20 minutes for a single tile and produces huge volumes of ceramic tile dust, as does the angle grinder now I come to think about it.
I didn’t think about the dust until I developed a dry cough which has mostly gone now but still occasionally rears its head.

The tiles arrived in April and I have now finished tiling the two walls and the windowsill. They still need grouting which is another new skill I am now approaching with some trepidation because it must surely hold further unknown pitfalls.

The other windowsill and the backsplash around the worktop at the other side of the utility room need tiling too, but that can now wait for a few months because I need to do some jobs in the garden and tiling the utility room has used up all my DIY time so far this summer.

The tiling looks nice.

I am pleased with the result.

I am glad I don’t have any more pipes or curved bits to do.

I’m pretty sure I am now due an honorary doctorate in tiling.

Bringing order to the chaos

What do you mean you don’t want more boring, mundane posts about things done in and around my flat? Cheeky scamp! Wind your neck in.

For a very long time, my cutlery drawer was like the wild West: unruly, brutal, unfeeling and packed full of horses. I threw everything back in when it was clean and dry, not caring where it went. You would need to rummage round to find what you were looking for and there was no guarantee you’d find it / that it was hiding in there. I even still had teaspoons Reuben had individually wrapped up for a laugh a few Christmases ago lurking about, the red, white and green paper mocking me from the back of the drawer. What a shambles.

These days I’m a new man. I’ve got a fresh ‘chude. The organiser serves as both a solution to and a continuation of the same problem; everything is neatly organised… IF it can fit in the cutlery holder. Some of the longer knives don’t and have to loosely spam about in a second drawer on the other side of the kitchen.

I also still have a lot of spoons.

The second horror of Christmas

Round here people like to put lights on their house for Christmas. You know there’s that house near you, where the people go a bit mad, and cover the whole thing in garish flashing multicoloured lights? Every year, because it’s their “thing”? Well, we more or less live in a whole town of people like that.

On our street, the people next door and the people over the road compete for the most Christmas lights every year. As a result we are trapped in the middle of the fairy light equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Here is the view out of our bedroom window this year.

And then, if you want a bit of a break from the light shining through the blinds, you can go round to the back, where this is the view.

Your comfortable life

The other week we put our bin out as usual. The black bin, which is recycling, and not the green bin, which is landfill. I would like to meet the person who chose that colour scheme and ask them why they have to take their problems out on the rest of us.

Anyway, we put it out, and when the binpeople had done their thing, we brought it back in. Except now it had a lid that didn’t work properly – it was attached only at one side and flapped around in an unhelpful manner when you tried to open it.

Luckily there’s an easy fix. Amazon will sell you new hinge pins for wheely bins, and for reasons I don’t fully understand it will sell you a pack of eight. Who needs to repair that many wheely bin hinges all at once?

When the new plastic things arrived I opened the pack and fitted one, which resolved the bin problem. I then noticed the label on the packet.

“QOPAHI”, it said, this being the sort of mindless collection of letters that makes up every brand name on Amazon these days. “Enjoy your comfortable life”.

Thanks, Qopahi. I will.

Damp saga

You’ve heard of tap saga. Now prepare yourself for… Damp Saga. The story of one man’s quest to conquer the Forces of Dampness that threaten to overthrow his way of life, turning everything slightly moist and, upon close inspection, slightly mouldy.

I am currently battling dampness on four war-torn fronts.

From the north, the paint on the bathroom windowframe and windowsill has worn away to a point where wood is visible. This is because, in their infinite wisdom, previous owners of the house positioned the bath under the window, so when you have a shower you spray the whole window area with water.

From above, the new loft insulation I fitted last year is keeping the house warm, but it’s also keeping the loft damp, with condensation forming to such a degree that in very cold weather it effectively rains in there. Everything we store in the loft is now under tarpaulins, except for the things we didn’t cover in time, which are ruined. I have fitted new vents to the roof to get some fresh air through it and eliminate this unwelcome indoor microclimate.

From below, the very high water table in this area (the whole housing estate might be built in what is technically a lake) means that in anything less than drought conditions the lawn is often under an inch of water. My neighbour has an elaborate plan to resolve this by digging big holes, creating new soakaway pits and laying pipes, though I can’t help feeling that his plan will only succeed if they are big enough to absorb all the rain in this area of Hampshire.

And from the west, water running downhill through a series of back gardens is now making its way through the wall of the garage, where it turns out the woodwork starts below ground level. This means that, now the monsoon season has arrived in the loft, we have nowhere to store anything that we wish to keep dry. A big damp patch is creeping across the floor and fixing it is going to involve removing a whole line of garden fence and digging up part of next door’s garden. I have made a half baked effort to deal with the symptoms using wood preserver and cutting holes in the garage wall to allow air in. I do not feel hopeful about this.

Unlike #tapsaga, there is no satisfying ending to this where, after a hundred frustrating steps, everything works out. This saga is just an ongoing list of damp situations. Thankfully the inside of my car is still dry, most of the time, so I have decided to live there instead. Please send towels and talcum powder.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Abodes

WFH