Today marks the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, and at Corner Cottage we are grateful that it marks the shortest day of the year. It's cold, it's overcast and dull, and the prospect of each day ahead being minutely longer is something to celebrate. There are two (2) ways to deal with the sub-zero …
Out here in the boondocks, all it takes is a couple of days' sunshine and we're assailed with massed lawnmowers, whippersnippers, and hedge trimmers roaring, revving and farting in glorious surround sound. Of course, the Corner Cottage versions of these tools are all electric -- if all of Braidwood went the same way, we'd reach …
You’ll be familiar with a special kind of obsession mentioned here before, that of making stuff: the intoxicating possibilities inherent in new tools and the unintended consequences of embarking willy-nilly on projects without adequate forward planning. For this amateur craftsperson, it’s is a long-term thing: from the early days at Hillside Nursery School, Bulawayo, where …
No need for improvisation on the latest Corner Cottage project. Creative juices not required to flow. It’s a pretty bog-standard sand-and-paint, and yet it’s all in service of an upgrade in quality of life as summer leans in on us more and more, bright and hot.Just to rewind a little, let’s think about the kinds …
You know, through the long, sweaty Singapore years, cooped up in our high-rise apartment, we often talked in a misty-eyed fashion about a golden future in which we’d have a garden. It would be an elegant, well-groomed, peaceful place, with gently tinkling rills, shady trees, lush lawns and rank upon rank of fragrant roses, peonies, …
As your faithful narrator has probably mentioned, the urge to tinker with stuff and maybe dismantle it is a lifetime one, especially when stuff doesn’t work (and dismantling stuff usually guarantees it will never work again). As youths, my group of mates were always building, making, destroying, repurposing and generally getting in where we shouldn’t …
It’s been a while since I’ve been on the tools, mainly due to the weather -- all that cold, rain and mud aren’t conducive to outdoor exertions. But there’s been a particular task weighing on the old mind and today was the day allotted to completing it. Remember the weeds in our lawn? Well, both …
Back into the bathroom this weekend for some DIY, this time the shower in the shed – or ‘studio’ – where I have my office. We noted months ago that the silicone sealant around the junction between wall and floor was mottling with mould, and it seemed like the kind of simple job that’s within …
Isambard Kingdom Brunel -- what an engineer. This bloke didn't design his way into the history books with just one innovation, or even two -- he just kept coming up with bold new material: tunnels, steel ships, suspension bridges. All brilliantly conceived and executed with due consideration of function driving form and such. It would …
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that despite our best efforts, one simple DIY job will generally spawn several more; when this principle is combined with the immutable law that no DIY job is as simple as it first appears, you have a rule or constant that indicates that a man’s work is never done. Worse, the …
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