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11:59 PM Garage nearly done But I'm almost out of time. I still need to touch up a little of the paint inside the lift at the bottom, add a handle of some sort (still not sure what) to the spindle at the top of the lift, and screw the helipad / lift roof on to the top of the lift.
Since kerbs have been added to the top level, some of the black around the edges needs touching up too. I don't think that's going to be possible though, since I'll only be able to do it in the evening and the black paint has an 18-hour drying time.

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7:24 PM Garage update Last night I painted the top level, which took forever, so I didn't have time to do the helipad - that will have to be done later. It ended up looking like this:


Today, as planned, I was left to my own devices so I could get the pieces cut out for the lift. Naturally, it rained, so out came the tarpaulin again to make my back yard into a makeshift tent.


After a lot of back-and-forth between the garage inside and the jigsaw outside, the pieces were finally cut into something approximating a reasonable fit.


Originally I had planned to use no screws or nails at all in construction, to minimise risk if someone fell on it, but I couldn't think of any sensible way to attach the lift walls to the supports in a reasonable timeframe, so I ended up using a small number of tiny wood screws. I would expect the lift itself to break away from the garage first if someone fell on it rather than pulling the walls off the lift, and even if the lift was pulled apart, the screws are all going into solid timber so they're unlikely to become exposed.

As well as the lift walls, I also used screws in the lift itself. I decided that only using glue to hold the floor of the lift on was asking for trouble, so the floor and ceiling are screwed into corner dowel rods. The walls will be glued to the outside of the dowels once they're painted. In the meantime the lift looks like a little cage.

Here's the lift shaft partially assembled, with the front sat next to it.


Now I have to paint everything. I may put a sign saying "LIFT" above each entrance, I'm not sure yet. All of the lift parts need painting, and of course the helipad does too, and also I need to fill the dowel holes on the underside of the garage and repaint it. So far the lift looks like this - everything has to be done in stages since I can't paint all sides of an object at once. Pesky gravity.


Once all of the paint has dried, I can glue everything together, glue the roof on, glue the whole lift to the garage itself, and then all I have to do is work out how to make a handle for the crank thing at the top and in theory it's finished.

2 days left.

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7:30 AM Garage building After Kirsten's birthday I decided to try to make her a toy car park / garage for Christmas. So I got some MDF and some bits of timber, and started work.

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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