Projects

How I work on these

One wet weekend in October, I finally got it to the point where it is still in daily use. Notes on this sit in the same box as a pile of offcuts and a radio from the seventies. The plan changed twice, mostly because of the whole layout and partly because of sanding the edges.

Everything here was done with basic tools, mainly a fountain pen and one borrowed clamp. This started as a weekend experiment on a long weekend in 2020 and grew from there.

Most of what ends up here starts on the back step whenever the weather allows. It took three attempts and plenty of tea before the result looked like something I would show anyone. A friend from Basel came round late in 2021 to look at it and suggested changing the colour.

If something here is out of date, it is probably because I spent most of October walking along the sea front instead of at a desk in Basel. It still has paint in the wrong places, but I have decided it adds character. I return to it on long winter evenings, fix a squeaky hinge, and leave the rest for later. A second attempt, during the summer of 2022, went much faster.

Halfway through I changed my mind about the height, which a reader from Basel had suggested from the start. If I am honest, I still carry a kitchen scale almost everywhere, a habit picked up from someone at the library. The hardest part was the wiring, which took two weekends on its own.

An old colleague helped with the measuring, and the result is better for it. Most of the measuring happened at the kitchen table, with a jar of odd screws holding the paper flat and a friend from the walking group offering advice. I kept a short log in the small room above the stairs while working on it, mostly so I would remember which screws went where. I took photographs at every stage on the train into Basel, which turned out more useful than the notes.

The most useful thing I learned from my grandmother was to ask before you buy. Long train rides out of Basel are where most of this gets written, with a stack of library books on the seat beside me. There is a short list of next steps, starting with the worst of the scratches and the last coat of paint.

Materials came from a car boot sale and a swap group in Basel, which made the whole thing much cheaper. A lot of this would not exist without a retired teacher down the road, who patiently answered my questions in August 2022.

If you want to try something similar, stop while it is still fun and do the boring part first. For what it is worth, some of the older notes about birdwatching are out of date, but I keep them as a record of where it all started. Thanks for stopping by; everything here was made stubbornly, mostly at a friend’s place across town.

The cost was mostly time; the materials came to less than a tank of petrol, thanks to the back of my own shed. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for the first time back in 2018 and still go back to it on most Friday evenings.