I recently moved my studio out to a place in the sticks because I was fed up of (not) working at home. The building was completely run down when I got here and I needed a bit of DIY therapy (caveman needs to hit things from time to time), so I set about making the space not only useable, but somewhere I would actually want to come and be creative.

For some reason I’ve always wanted a studio with wooden floors and an old leather sofa – don’t ask. The floors in this building were solid, cold concrete. So after securing the place by boarding/bricking the windows and having an alarm installed, the first thing I did was look on GumTree to look for old pallets. I found a guy locally who had a 100+ American pallets he wanted to get rid of (apparently they’re not much use here in England) and, after some wrong calculations, enlisted the help of a good friend to go and pick up 50(!) of them in his van. Free wood!

The thing with American pallets, we soon learned, is that because they’re made of hardwood, as opposed to what we use for our pallets here, they weigh a ton! This bode well for the quality of the finished floor, but was a real ball ache when it came to moving them and, the next job, breaking them apart for their wood. The planks were so hard to remove that nearly every one would split, no matter how careful I was. So I decided to be a bit wasteful and saw the center section out of the pallets with a circular saw, before wiggling them loose by hand.

It was definitely quicker than plan A, but still took two very long days (and nights!) to completely dismantle enough to board the whole floor (about 30)!

This was half way...

With that job thankfully complete I realised I would no longer be able to do what I had planned and use the now free ‘spines’ as spacers, effectively rebuilding the pallets on the ground in the shape and stagger I wanted. The solution was just to use the remaining whole pallets to create the riser on which to start laying the boards.

Had to custom make skinny pallets for the gap on the left

Another problem became apparent pretty quickly: with every board a different length, height and width (they’re obviously crudely engineered to save money) I had to hand pick each plank for a row before going back and countersinking then screwing them all down. In hindsight, I should have nailed them, but after disassembling some 350 planks, most with tens of nails in – one can only assume someone with a nail gun was excited – I couldn’t bear the thought of anything so permanent. At least the good thing about the screws is that I’ve been able to go over in retrospect and remove the few *really* squeaky boards and plane them down where necessary.

Once the floor was down (and looking, frankly, amazing) my lady friend and I spent the long weekend filling the numerous holes in walls and painting, as well as adapting the roof support to make a shelf for all my shit.

amazing what a lick of paint can do!

Guest appearance from my underpants. Thanks, underpants.

The only thing missing is the brown leather sofa – which I’m getting next week from a friend :)

the last addition was a dimmer switch :)

I’m gutted I don’t have a picture of how utterly shit it was in here before we had even boarded the windows. You just have to take my word for it. This actually only accounts for about 2 weeks of ‘lost time’ but I’ve written enough for today. Stay tuned for more DIY tips from your favourite *music* blog. Ha. You think I’m joking?

Programmes will continue as normal afte>>r this int_rmis__on. ?!@$>

I should tell you a little more about this man at some point!

Not today though, I have lyrics to lyric :|

Next week will be build-a-stage-setup week. Hopefully no longer than. I tend to get quite immersed in those things. If anyone notices I’ve disappeared again for more than a week please give me a poke and remind me to write music too.

Once I have these last lyrics written I promise to get back to all the lovely emails you’re sent recently… I presume something must have aired in Canada with Bretts skate video? Anyway, I’m getting to it!

x

Dan went back to the states on Monday and my week so far has been a flurry of moving SB equipment, overdue bills and family commitments. switching to normality now…

*click*