At least, I tried to. To do any cutting or drilling I need to be outside and it needs to be daytime, since cleaning up the aftermath in the house is a nightmare and at night I would wake Kirsten (also, dark). Caroline is busy with Sing and Sign on Saturdays, so I look after Kirsten all day, which means it's Sundays or nothing. Of course, it then rained for a few Sundays in a row.
Eventually I gave up and just put a tarpaulin over the washing lines in the yard, and worked under that. The resultant pieces looked like this by the end of November:
Each of the pillars was made from timber that had to be split into quarters down its length, because all of the pieces I'd got were much too thick. Too thick for my jigsaw, in fact, so I had to cut them manually with a big saw - that's why they're a bit irregular. The down-side of buying something listed as "a bag of wood" from Unique Scrap Store.
When assembled, they looked like this:
Next I had to decide on positions for the pillars, then sand them, drill holes for the dowel joints holding the pillars in place, and sand off the edges of the ramp so it would sit right. But then we all got the flu for a week, which meant that by the time I'd got all that done and had painted the MDF boards black and primed the pillars, it was mid-December. Here's the bottom board while it was being decorated with parking places and so on:
Finally, last night it was time to take the plunge and glue the pillars into place, with the top board on. I'd already glued the ramp into place the night before so that I could line up the road markings, so that helped to keep everything in the right place. It started to look like a car park!
There was then the "oh god what have I done" moment to come afterwards, where I used wood filler to fill in the holes above the dowel joints and to create a smooth(ish) join between the ramp and the top and bottom levels:
Next, I sanded the filler and painted it black, then gave the top level another coat of black. Here's what it looks like this morning:
Tonight I need to put the road markings and parking bays on the top level (and finish off the ramp markings), so that it's all dry and ready for Saturday, when Caroline is, in theory, taking Kirsten out for the day so I can cut the pieces for the lift - that will be a plywood and timber structure in that cut-out corner next to the ramp which currently has nothing in it. It'll have a helipad on top, since that is apparently a necessity, so I'll paint that tonight as well. As soon as I work out what a helipad is supposed to look like, anyway.
With any luck, it'll actually be finished for Christmas. If not, the lift will have to be installed later.
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