Some things take a little while

I have a very long list of jobs, and a lot of stock items associated with them. I don't fully understand the process by which things get put off for another time - something to do with the difference between the important and the urgent?  When I acquire materials I almost always intend to process them reasonably quickly, but that often doesn't follow.  My record, I think, is a package in the workshop which contains the pieces of teak and slate needed to make a small coffee table, which is wrapped in newspaper dated 1975.  I should be able to sort it by the end of 2015, I think.

So my third willow basket has happened at lightning speed.  In January my younger son and his wife donated  a red wig for my car:

This was some overgrown willow from their Devon garden.  I don't know a great deal about all the various willows, but this had the advantage of beautiful colour variations from yellow to red, and the disadvantage of being rather thick-stemmed with lots of side shoots. When I got it home I spent ages trimming off the sideshoots, and used the thickest rods to create a screen for some of our compost bins.  The rest went in the bath to increase its pliability (not our only bath, in case you were wondering):

As I worked with it, I learned a lot about which rods were really too thick for the job in hand, so the outcome was a rough-and-ready (artisanal?) basket which has now gone back to Devon to hold logs for the willow-providers.  They are kind enough to say it's fine.  As it's the first basket I've made without expert supervision, I'm grateful to them, but shall be aiming higher next time.

Bath installation

Well, this was the easiest bit of 'plumbing' I've ever done.  Ever since I brought my crop of willow from Devon, I've been wondering whether I could use our fish pond to soak it.  This seemed a bit harsh on our fish, so I advertised on Flintshire Freegle for a bath.  The system is great, and the following day I was able to help a chap in Abergele get rid of part of his rubbish after a bathroom refit.

This afternoon, in an icy wind, I popped the bath onto a couple of building blocks alongside the barn and out of sight behind an IBC, handily placed to fill it.  So in went the stored rainwater, and the willow, and in a few days time I'll be hoping to start my next basket.

Shelves to Devon

Our younger son and his wife have recently moved to South Hams in Devon to pursue their medical training, aiming to qualify as GPs in a couple of years' time.  On our first visit to their new house we identified an alcove which was asking quietly to be filled with book storage.  Obviously a job for some stock timber and tools back home, with the interesting question of how best to get it south.

The shelving timber came from my long-used Manchester timber-yard on the Subaru's roofbars.  Much clamping produced double-width pieces to form the lower storage section, fitted with mdf doors on hinges recycled from our old kitchen cabinets.  Suitably routed and glued together, the shelves entered the painting stage:

Just about this time, the weather changed and the temperature plummeted, leading to condensation forming on the underside of the barn roof and dripping onto the paintshop below.  Time to dig out a tarpaulin and rig a roof lining:

The next problem was transporting a highly flexible sheet of 6mm plywood for the backs of the units from Denbigh on a rainy day.  Sheet materials have a way of taking off from roofracks if you're not careful, so I took with me some battens and G clamps and bought a cheap sheet of hardboard as a rain cover.  It worked a treat:

I didn't fit the back to the upper shelf unit at this point as I needed the uprights to fit snugly around the head restraints on the front seats of the car - otherwise it would not have fitted in.  The lower storage unit went underneath it, with doors and loose shelves wrapped in copious amounts of cardboard.  Three hundred miles later, and with a little more construction time, here it was:

My customers were pleased, and I was glad to have the space back in the barn.  However, before I left it seemed a good idea to help to prune their pollarded willows, and with basket-making in mind I ended up bringing the Subaru back to North Wales wearing a dishevelled red wig (the car, not me):

So for now the willow is taking up the space in the barn which the shelves vacated.  More stock.  Sigh...