Ok, we’ve moved. Thanks to the helpful horde, from truck arriving in Newtown to truck leaving from Brooklyn was two and a half hours, which must be some kind of record for the amount of stuff we had. So cheers, all. Got the final tip run done a day early and I can now bring to work a brain that’s capable of thinking about work, not house.

House currently lacks… lots. Hot water should be on by the end of today, but there’s scaffolding in the main room, a ladder in the bath, lots of plastering to do, internal doors to hang, a pump to wire up, and the bedroom still holes to the outside and an unpainted ceiling. When there’s a tarp just outside the bedroom window and the wind is gusting overnight to 130 then you can understand why we didn’t get much sleep last night.

Oh, and the internet’s not working, it’s complaining about DHCP, which confuses me coz Telstra uses static IPs. I dunno.

But still, we’re in and can relax a little.

Lots done today.

We have lights:

We’re about to have outside stairs, down to the workshop. After this flight, the stairs turn the corner, so Cliff & Jarrod’s progress slowed somewhat:

Today for me was letterbox, thirteen shelves, tidying, and helping with sanding & painting the kitchen, dining, & bathroom ceilings, and second coat of oil on the wooden floor upstairs. There was tieke, Cliff, the Jarrods, Kylie, Paul & Joe the plumbers, Simon the tiler, and Duncan the sparkie all on site.

So yeah, lots done today. Time to sleep now.

Ok, it’s looking like it’s all on track. Yesterday we managed stairs inside, electricity live, and the upstairs floor sanded and oiled. Remaining is water, gas, appliances, outside stairs, one more lockable outside door, and a whole host of other crap. Oh, and then packing and moving. Doable, but…

Anyway, pics in a hurry:

Now we’re even more tired, but kinda just barely hanging on to being on track to move in this Sunday. We’re limewashing and trenching, and shortly to be oiling floors and building racking*, other people are wiring up, building stairs inside & out, putting in the balustrade, installing a door on the gimp cupboard, grouting & sealing, connecting up the plumbing, alarm, gas, and I don’t know what else, but that’s okay, coz I have a spreadsheet to keep track of all that.

There may be gibbering soon.

One more of the floor, coz it’s pretty:

If anyone’s free tomorrow or evenings this week, then yeah, I could indeed use a hand.

* – cheap fast racking: drill 12 mm holes 100 mm deep into the concrete walls. Hammer in 400 mm of 12 mm reinforcing bar, use spare 12 wide board for shelves and load up with whatever’s on the floor that you want on the wall.

I’m quite tired.

But one more hour of waxing in a corner will finish the downstairs floor.

We have light switches.

Various rooms are nearly done, or at least all they need are surface finishes: floor sanding & oiling, and such like.

I’m sufficiently tired that I’ve lost grasp of the whole project, there’s just a list of tasks to be done, stretching into the future. However, that’s why we have spreadsheets, to keep track of what needs to be done, when, and by who.

So, today was:
1) Painting linseed oil all over the floor
2) Helping a friend home after her back scarification
3) Writing more colour cycling code

I could get into this “holiday” thing.

1) We’ve been cracking on with the floor. With copious assistance, it’s progressing and we’ll break the back of it before the builders are back. It’s a poured earth floor, so finishing it involves lots of clay slip, then linseed oil, then rubbing with linseed oil, then wax. Here’s what it looks like after the linseed oil:

Tomorrow (Wednesday), we’re having a day off, while the oil soaks in. And then tieke will be in gainful employment and I’ll be at the house with more oil, with occasional breaks to dig post holes. You are all invited to come and do your backs in.

2) It’s tatjna. There’ll be pics.

3) Just picking random RGB values and fading from one set to the next is easy but looks crap. Current method is to consider the RGB colourspace as a 3D space and loop or spiral within that space. Alternatively, loop or spiral within the Hue-Saturation-Brightness space. Either way, I’m enjoying using Processing for this. Lots of effort goes into making it look right.

Also managed to get the tiny battery charging circuit alive for the next toy, though it’s doing odd things that I haven’t the time to think about yet. Is an LTC4060 to charge three NiMCh cells off 7.5 Volts and I’m liking that I put multiple status LEDs on the board. I’m not liking the exposed thermal pad under the chip, it’s impossible to solder to so I’m bodging in some copper tape as a tatty heatsink. It may be time to invest in a frying pan and some solder paste: