A Cat Scratching Post Will Do The Trick
I just love cats, in fact my whole family loves pets and cats are our favourite pet. We’ve had cats for years and wouldn’t have anything else for a pet. We just aren’t a dog family.
Even when I was a baby and a little boy my parents had cats as well and even then I used to love them. Our 1st cat, or at least the 1st that I can remember, was called Sox. Then came Timmy, and then we had a whole string of cats, often 2 or 3 at a time.
Dogs are noisy, they often bark all the time, they poop all over the place and they smell. And a dog eats so much, especially a big dog, that you can go broke trying to feed them.
We have friends who keep their dogs in the house. There’s dog fur everywhere and the house smells of dog.
And their car is even worse.
Give me a cat any day. They’re social, friendly and clean. And they don’t smell.
But cats still have their problems. One of the major problems you might need to overcome if you get a cat is that they love to scratch. Scratching is what cats do.
Wait and see what the legs of your favourite table looked like once you take cats in the household for a while. Chances are your cat has ruined your table legs and possibly torn up some of your other favourite furniture as well.
But I’ve recently discovered cat scratching posts. A cat scratching post is a bit of cat furniture specifically designed so that your favourite feline has somewhere to scratch away to keep him happy, somewhere that doesn’t matter to you and somewhere where he is encouraged to do it.
Get a cat scratching post and you’ll find that your scratching problems are over.
As they aren’t that expensive, $20 or $30 will get you one and it is far cheaper than replacing your favourite dining room table. Read more
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Stormwater Pipes Part 2
So you’ve got your gutters in place and you’ve got your water tanks in place and everything is ready for you to collect your own water off the roof of the house. But with things the way they are you aren’t going to be getting any water are you?
Because you haven’t connected your gutters to your water tanks. If there is no pipes that go from the gutters to the water tanks then there is no water that goes from the gutters to the water tanks.
You need to connect your downpipes. Luckily all of these things are now made in plastic and it’s very easy to work with these plastic pipes. You can cut them easily with a hacksaw and you can also glue them very easily with the right type of glue.
But it’s probably better to use rivets to connect your downpipes to your gutters using the small circle of galvanised metal fitting that hangs below the gutter where the water is to run out.
Just fill a hole through the plastic of the downpipe and the galvanised iron and pop a rivet in place and this will hold them securely.
Your downpipes run down the wall below the surface of the ground and then perform a 90 degree turn and then you lay more plastic pipes from there right through to your water tank. Luckily you can also buy the 90 degree bends in plastic and so it’s just a matter of glueing them on and sticking all of it together. And then when you reach the water tank you do the exact reverse and you have a 90 degree bend into a piece of plastic pipe leading up to the water tank entrance, and 2 more 90 degree bends to direct the water into the tank.
It’s always worth remembering that you should paint any of the plastic piping that is above the ground because over time it can break down in the sun because of the UV radiation. It’s very easy to paint them, just paint them the same colour as the house and you won’t even notice them on if you don’t paint them then you will find that they stick out and look all wrong. Read more
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Got That? Why Not Try Stormwater Next?
Okay now it’s time to think about other things you can do around the house by yourself.
I’ll give you another example of something that really isn’t very hard to do yourself if you apply yourself to learning about it.
That’s doing your own stormwater. Stormwater is where the water goes when it rains on your roof. 1st it goes into gutters then it flows from the gutters into downpipes which go under the ground to wherever the water is intended to go. In my place it goes to plastic storage tanks because I live in the country and I need to supply my own water to the house because there is no water available anywhere else for a house water supply.
Everyone around me has their own water tanks and they collect their water from the roof and then use that water for their normal daily water needs.
In fact I prefer that to having a supply of town water because I had nice clean water with no chlorine in it. I hate drinking chlorine and every time I go to my mother’s house and drink city water I find it almost impossible to drink because of the horrible taste of chlorine.
Doing your own stormwater really isn’t all that difficult. Of course you have to get the tanks into place so you’ve got to have the right place to put them all levelled so that the tanks can sit on a nice level base of packing sand. So you have to put some thought into where you want to put your tanks because once you have them in place they aren’t going anywhere.
It is virtually impossible to move water tanks. Full of water they weigh tons but even if they are empty they are extremely difficult to move so you have to put a lot of thought into where you want to put your water tanks. Make a mistake at your peril.
Then it’s simply a matter of mailing brackets on for the guttering to clip into. Each of the brackets is made in a certain shape so that the guttering just snaps into it once you have your brackets in place. Make sure to remember that the guttering has to slow down towards the hole where the water exits otherwise it will run through the wrong end.
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And Building A Garage Gives You Skills
That’s the story building my own garage. If you can follow it I hope that you find it useful enough to build one for yourself.
There’s so many things around your house that you can do for yourself want to take time and make the effort to learn how to do it for yourself. It is always so much cheaper to do it yourself and you get a huge sense of achievement by doing that.
And of course it gives you a series of new skills that you can apply to other things. For instance my children wanted to have a playhouse. When I thought about it I realise that a playhouse is really no different to a garage, and that if I could build a garage I could build a playhouse without any effort at all.
Because the playhouse was to be so much smaller I even mixed up my own concrete and poured it myself to make the slab for the playhouse. You could make a timber floor but it really didn’t take a lot of extra time and effort to mix up concrete and make a nice concrete floor and now it’s very easy to use and to clean.
The process is exactly the same. You make your concrete slab, you build your frames to your walls and then stand up one by one in place and bolt them together and bolt them to the concrete floor and then you have a secure frame. You add the holes for the windows and doors and that is where you’re putting your windows for the playhouse allthough in my case I didn’t even bother to put any glass in the windows because they were only small windows and they faced away from the prevailing wind and it doesn’t even matter if a little rain gets in there anyway.
And I also didn’t bother to make a door because my kids really are worried if there is a door or not, although I have to say I did make a little Veranda out the front so that the door is covered and the rain won’t blow in.
So you can see that you acquire skills doing one thing and then you can apply them to something else. It cost me about half of what you would expect it to cost to get a garage built for you and I managed to get my playhouse built for my kids without it costing very much at all. Read more
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So What Do You Do Next?
I mentioned in my last story that there were some more things that you need to do if you want to make your garage complete. Here’s a few extra things you might like to think about if you want to make your garage more useful.
You need to have a workbench. A workbench is a place where you put all your tools and also where you work on things you need to work on. And I like to have some extra things fitted to my workbench too like a vice and an electric grinder.
So how do you build a workbench?
You need to have a frame in place to build your workbench on and you can again use pine timber to build a frame of your bench. It’s relatively simple to do but you have to make sure that you make it strong enough to support the weight of anything that might be on your bench including the weight of the bench itself.
You need to bolt together a series of uprights and horizontal members with a flat top to sit your bench on.
I used a three-quarter inch piece of MDF as my benchtop and it has worked very well. I bolted my vice straight through the MDF and I also bolted my grinder right through the MDF and both have held very well. I have heard that MDF is too soft to do this with but I have not found this to be true.
I made them both a top surface and a 2nd surface for my workbench, in other words a higher and a lower bench. This is because I need a large storage area for all my electrical tools and my other tools.
I workbench is working extremely well and it’s a good way to make your garage more useful.
The other thing to do if you wish is to line the inside of the garage. Of course if you put weatherboard on the outside of the frame you still have frame on the inside and this doesn’t look so good. So you can use a lining materials such as cement sheet to line the inside if you wish, though it isn’t necessary and of course it adds to the expense. Read more
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What About A Roller Door?
So you have the basis of a good garage now. You’ve got your walls up, you’ve got your doors in, you’ve got your windows in, you’ve weatherboarded your walls, you put up your carport, installed your girders and rafters and put the metal on the roof to form a waterproof and weatherproof structure.
But there are still a few things to do. For instance I needed to have a roller door that I could lift up and down easily so that I could put the car in the garage. Of course you don’t need a roller door, they’re not cheap but there are good solution to a door for your garage.
I bought the door that I used and then of course you have to fit it. A roller door for a garage isn’t exactly light and so you have to come up with a way to lift it up into position and bolt it into position. Of course if you’re doing it with other people they might be able to hold it while you bolt it in place but if you’re on your own then you need some form of system to get your door in place.
I used a series of ladders and clamps to get the door in place and then bolted the brackets where they needed to be.
The roller door works really well and is easy to lift up and pull down and is a good solution to a garage door.
That’s pretty much all the readers to building your own garage and carport.
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Now It’s Time For The Weatherboards.
Okay so you’ve got the roof in place. What do you do next?
Well you’ve got all your wall frames in place but at the moment they’re just uncovered frames so you need to cover your frames to make your external cladding.
I used timber weatherboards which look great and which are relatively inexpensive. There is a place near me that machines weatherboards and I love the look of their natural weatherboards. They cut them from a whole trunk of a tree cutting from the outside to the inside of the tree producing a tapered weatherboard that retains the natural edge that would have been the outside of the tree so you get this curvy looking edge to your weatherboards and this looks really good.
Of course you have to get them onto the walls. You need to nail them on the walls and you have to remember to use galvanised nails or your nails will rust over time and your weatherboards will fall off. I was surprised at how expensive galvanised nails really can be.
It’s a long day nailing up your weatherboards. I was working by myself which meant that I had to nail my boards and hold them up at the same time. This is a very easy because you have to hold your board with one hand while you nail with the other. The boards are heavy and you hold them in place with your left hand, grabb the drill which is hanging from your belt and drill a hole with your right hand, put the drill down, put a nail in the hole with your right hand, take the hammer off your belt and try and drive the nail without letting the board slip down at either end.
After awhile you get the hang of it but you also have accidents and have to start some boards again.
And I forgot to mention that each board has to be cut to the exact right length or else you have a problem. Read more
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