January 2021 – Rõika 15

The bathroom window

Time flies. After making the plans for the bathroom window, it took some time for Mo and me to get to the glass shop and double check on the colours of the stained glass and which frosted glass to pick. But then we could instantly order the glass and the lead strips that had to connect the pieces.

While waiting for the delivery, I sanded and painted the windows frame. Since it is Mondriaan design we picked black. It looks very classy.

A few days later I could pick up the glass and the I could finally put everything together. I started by laying out all the pieces and cutting the lead to size. Then part by part I put in the glass and put in the nails to hold the glass before I could put in the glazing putty.

The result was so nice I instantly wanted to make a picture to send to Mo, who was at work. I put the window in place and kind of had to push it in as it was a bit tight. Click , picture, click, another picture. OH NOOO. There the frame fell towards me and the a big bang a lot of glass broke. Tears forced their way out. I was so sad.

A bit later everything was cleaned up and I had ordered 4 new pieces. The positive side was that only white and blue had broken which where the cheapest colours. Luckily the replacement glass was available soon, and the result was just as great.

Earlier in the week I had lost my phone so some of the posts have a few pictures less then normal since I had not synced my phone for a while.

LED strips for the bedroom

With the new year, the winter also started. In the past weeks there was regular snow and wintery temperatures up or better down to -10.
Nice weather to work inside. Just over a year ago I already made a test setup, so I guess it as about time to actually put this stuff together. After some first trying it was not working stable, but with the help of some forums and my uncle I got the controller stable by adding a so called level shifter. Unfortunately the manual where somewhat unclear on how to connect them, but once I got it connected, the software was running stable and all effects instantly where picked up by the LED strip.

Time to cut the LED strips to length and install them on the beams in the bedroom. The first strip went pretty smooth and also the second strip was connected quick enough, but for some reason the third strip did not work. I need to really look into what is going wrong here some other time.

During the weekend we had a sauna, since the wooden floor parts are almost gone I changed to different wood, which seemed to burn hotter then the floor parts, with the result we had an unplanned new record high in the sauna. Good thing the garden is full of snow, so we could cool down making snow angels.

Start of a chair

About two months ago I talked with Mo about her birthday present. As I found out she is very fond of ‘De Stijl‘ I aked if she would like a Rietveld chair for her birthday, which would be delivered a bit later… Time flies so it was about time to start building it. As wikipedia has a full list of used parts it was pretty easy to calculate how much wood I would need. Since beech wood is very hard to get in Estonia, I used pine.

I started with a beam that I cut to length, then I cut them to size followed by drilling the holes for the dowels. When dry fitting them, it quickly started to look like the chair. As I did not have the sheet wood, I put a few other pieces to get a feel of the later result. Time to get paint.

With these darker days it was getting a bit annoying that the light in the garage kitchen did not work. After testing together with Jan who stopped by for a visit, I consulted with Loeke. The solution was actually pretty simple. It turned out the common ground and the switched ground where close to each other, and not explicitly marked. Since the switched ground strip was full I had continued with the common ground, which is a different circuit, so the circuit break did work as designed. I added a extra strip to split both grounds up and then I had light in the kitchen and under the train roof.

In the mean time it seems winter has started with a nice layer of snow and temperatures under 0.