When we moved into Meadow Towers there was no furniture other than the wardrobes and a dining room table, even though it was listed as “partly furnished”. Being on an incredibly tight budget at the time I had to get the cheapest furniture around – this meant Argos and crappy quality.

The desk I got did the job but it just wasn’t deep enough – 49 cm just didn’t provide enough room for me to get the keyboard far enough away from me so that I could type comfortably (I type slightly oddly with the full length of my forearms supported on the desk) which has meant since moving in back last September, using my computer for any length of time has led to buzzing, shooting pains all the way up to my elbows, an inability to grip, and general ouchiness. I didn’t realize that the problem was the desk till I started full time work in an office that had wonderful deep desks. How come I could type all day at work with nary a problem, yet five minutes on my own computer was enough to have me crying in pain?

Our lease here at Meadow Towers was up for renewal in September and for a while it looked like we might be moving. If that was the case, I’d have put up with the desk for the last few months, then ditched it when we moved into whatever new place we found and got a better desk. Last week we decided we actually really liked it here, lack of outside space and no-pets not withstanding, and that we’re going to stay. As soon as I had that decision, I realised something had to be done about the desk.

After conferring with the Crazy Canalman, we decided the cheapest and easiest solution was to just build an extra desktop with the desired depth and screw it to the existing desk. He came down last weekend to do the necessary with some plywood and I now have a desk that is 80 cm deep – that’s nearly double the area I had before! (And actually about 20 cm more than I needed, but more on that later). Ideally, I would have covered the blank plywood before Farv screwed it to the desk, but I don’t have the tools to do it myself here at Meadow Towers, nor do I have space to store a giant slab of plywood whilst I get around to being creative on it. So he screwed the new desktop down and left me to it. The surface seemed smooth enough, so I figured I could leave it as-is for a few weeks till I knew how I wanted to cover it.

One day and numerous splinters later, I knew something had to be done, and quickly! So this weekend I sat myself down with a pile of torn up newspapers, some PVA glue, and a brush, et voila! My beautiful new desk!

What do you need:

1. A desk. Doesn’t have to be a new desk, doesn’t even have to be a desk actually, just whatever you want to cover.
2. A father willing to cut the wood to size for you and then drive 1 1/2 hours out of his way to attach it to your desk, buy you lunch, then drive 1 1/2 hours back again. Have I told you lately how wonderful my father is?
3. A pile of old newspapers that you got your long-suffering flatmate to lug home, then only use one paper from.
4. PVA glue watered down to roughly 1 part PVA to 3 parts water, though measuring this out is nigh on impossible. Just make a nice watery paste that looks the same colour and consistency of milk. The whole desk took about 125ml of PVA.
5. A 1 inch brush that you aren’t too attached to – don’t get the cheapest in the shop as these molt bristles like there’s no tomorrow, but don’t get the real expensive branded one either. I spent £2.50 on my brush and that only lost two bristles.
6. A tin of water based clear varnish. This is quicker drying, smells less, and won’t react with the pva/paper mix like solvent based varnishes can. I used about 125ml of varnish to get two decent coats on the desk.

What you need to do:

1. Make sure the surface you are covering is as smooth as possible and dust free.
2. Put a coat of the PVA/water mix on to seal the wood.
3. While this is drying, tear up a newspaper into pieces between an inch and two inches square. Don’t make them too even. Also don’t make them too big, or too small. Too small and it just takes an age to cover a large area. Too big and they go all wrinkly and don’t leave a nice flat finish.
4. Once the undercoat is dry, cover the surface using the good-old papier mache technique we all remember from childhood. (Glue on the surface, put the paper on the glue, cover with more glue… rinse and repeat till done).
5. Try to be as random as possible with your pieces. Mix pictures and text. Mix the orientation of the text. Overlap. Higgledee-Piggledee is what you are going for.
6. When that first layer is fully dry – if possible leave it over night to make sure – do a second coat to cover any missed spots and to make the edges look neat.
7. When that was dry, I did a third ‘layer’ of a few pictures and clippings that I really liked from some film magazines. I spread these randomly over the surface of the desk in places where I knew they would catch my eye and not be covered by the computer. Don’t go overboard with these – the idea is to create accent pieces, not recover the entire desk in them – I used ten or twelve such images on the entire desk.
8. When you are certain that is all dry and you like how it looks, do a couple of coats of clear varnish over the whole to seal it and make it waterproof. Instructions for different varnishes vary, so follow what it says on the tin, but do make sure the room is as ventilated as possible!
9. Finally, put everything back on your pretty ‘new’ desk and gloat.

I am definitely gloating over my new desk – I have so much more space and typing is once again comfortable. You can’t really tell from the pictures but my computer isn’t actually pushed all the way to the back of the desk. This is because if it was I wouldn’t be able to see the screen. For some reason Farv got a little confused with the measurements and made it 20 cm deeper than I asked for. This has actually turned out for the best because when I want to do craft or writing on the desk, all I have to do is push the computer to the back of the desk and I have enough space (before I would have to laboriously unplug and move everything).

The desk is ideal for me now as I like to have free space around me as I work – my unorganized mind and rest of my room aside – I hate to have a cluttered workspace. I even got all giddy about my new desk and utilized the extra space to make some earrings and some notebooks.

The whole thing cost around £20 (£10 for the wood). It would have come to less than £20 if I could have found the PVA, brushes, and varnish I had left over from another project, but either way it still comes to less than a new desk. Happy Cas 🙂

Ok, if the blog suddenly falls of the face of the earth, worry not – it should be back up shortly. Turns out fasthosts really suck as server providers. Or Bright Meadow is just getting too darn popular.

Anyway, looks like I’m exceeding my monthly bandwidth ( 😛 ) I do have a solution to this in the form of a years free hosting from Media Temple (the card is sitting on the desk right now, thanks Bryan!) but I actually need to grit my teeth and do the whole migration thing.

Ugh.

And eek! Because it’s scary!

Anyway, please bear with me through this (potentially) buggy period. Things will hopefully be shiny and new soon 🙂

I’m gonna keep posting, and y’all keep commenting, and hopefully if I ignore the problem it will go away 😉

It’s odd, what sets me off to blogging. I had to take the morning off work as there was a workman from Bob’s Plumbing (no joke, that is the company’s name!) coming round to do something technical to the boiler here at Meadow Towers. Non-urgent work, but work that had to get done before the cold weather comes back – knowing my luck if they weren’t looked into now the repairs would become urgent just when we were starting to freeze in our beds. ^*1*

Now I am so completely snowed under at work at the moment (the Energizer Bunny has had no admin for the past nine months… The resulting backlog and mess has to be seen to be believed) that I can’t really afford to take a morning off, but then again Moose was even more unable to take the morning off, so I had to do it. I quite enjoyed the extra hour in bed 😀 I had all these grand plans of what I was going to do this morning as well – I would catch up on emails, I would write some content for the poor blog (I have been neglecting it of late, sorry), I would… Oh, all kinds of things.

Do I get any of it done? No, of course not. For starters I am incapable of ‘catching up’ with emails. Some things are never gonna happen, no matter how much we may want them to. Blog posts? Don’t be silly. Part of the problem was that Bob the Plumber spent a fair amount of time drilling holes into the wall between my room and the boiler cupboard – hardly conducive to nice computing. The other part of the problem was, well, day time TV. Much though it sucks, I still ended up spending my precious morning off loafing on the sofa watching crap on Freeview. So I got nothing blogged.

Then what happens – I’m sitting in work surrounded by enough piles of paper that it looks like I’m building a fort around my desk and I get all inspired. Bollocks.

Luckily I’m able to fire up Outlook and write myself an email with the germ of the idea in it, but I do find it very hard to just leave things at the ‘germ’. Once I get an idea, I like to sit down and just write till the idea is done. I can leave it at the final polishing stage easily, but anything less and I get all antsy. I don’t like leaving things half finished and on top of that I am petrified that when I get back to something half-written, I won’t be able to finish it off. That the muse will have deserted me (this has happened on more than one occasion).

Aw crap. I clearly really need to get me a job where I can write for a living. The more and more I think about it, the more and more that sounds like a wonderful job. Not journalism – the whole sniffing out stories thing has never appealed – but… something. The dream, dream? Get a gig like Carry in “Sex in the City” and write a newspaper column (or, ok blog if you insist) about something that interests me, or failing that my life, and that pays enough to keep me in the style to which I would like to become accustomed.

Failing that, I would love to be an editor…

Anything but what I am doing and what I have the qualifications for, basically.

Anyone got any ideas how I can make this dream a reality? I would be really, really grateful! Make you a Minion and everything 😀

Endnotes:
^*1* Meadow Towers is lovely, just really badly insulated. In the winter it is freezing to the point of being able to see your breath if we don’t have the heating on full blast. In the summer it can get sweltering to the point it’s hotter inside than it is outside. Other than that, and the lack of outside space, and the no-pets thing, it is a dream apartment.^Back

You might have been asking yourself why I wanted to join 9rules.

It’s the people of course.

How can you not want to be a part of that?

And don’t forget to check out their scrumptoulicicious new look. It’s more than just a pretty new face as well – lots of shiny new bits to play with and explore. I’d tell you which communities Bright Meadow is in, but that would spoil all the fun of looking 😉

Last Sunday I completed the Race for Life 2006 in Southampton. My reasons for deciding to do the 5 km run (that’s around 3 miles, give or take), can be seen on this post. Suffice it to say, I’ve lost lots of people I care about to cancer, and I know there many more who are battling the disease at the moment.

The Race for Life is an annual women only event organised by Cancer Research UK. All the money raised through sponsorship goes directly to the charity – all admin costs for the run etc are covered by the entry fee paid by all the runners – so you can be assured that any money you donate will go straight into funding the fight against cancer.

This is a cause I care passionately about and, I promise you, this will be the only time I ask you for money (till next summer rolls around and the 2007 Race for Life). Several of you have already sponsored me and you have my heartfelt gratitude and thanks. Several more of you have said things along the line of “damn it, I missed it. I’ll sponsor you next year”. Why wait till next year? The online sponsorship page is still open and will be till the 30th of July.

So how did the Race go? Well, I managed to beat last years time and got home in under 50 minutes. The actual time is somewhere between 45 minutes and 50 minutes because the girl with the watch (Moose) and I got separated at about the 2 km mark and I’d been finished a little while before I remembered to nab someone with a watch and do a time check. Moose managed it in 43 minutes! (Big woot to Moose!) I was no where near as fit as I was last year, or as fit as I wanted to be – I had grand plans to run the majority – but it was just too hot and I’m just not built to move at any great velocity I am afraid.

My thanks also to illyna and Super Girl who looked after house-keys etc, waited around for an hour on a blazing hot Sunday afternoon, and met us at the finish with large bottles of water. I didn’t take any pictures this year but the ones from last year basically tell the same story. Lots of women, lots of sun!

It’s a cliche, but every little really does help, and I would love to reach my target of £180. Whether you decide to give 50p or £50, I appreciate it. Sponsoring is really simple – go to the online sponsorship page, click on the pink “sponsor me now” button at the bottom of the page, and follow the instructions. If needs must I’m also still accepting sponsorship via paypal – if you want to use this option (though I do recommend and prefer the official sponsorship page) contact me and I will let you know the details.

Thank you again to everyone who’s already sponsored me, and thank you in advance to anyone else who decides they are going to do their little bit for a very worthwhile charity. The closing date for sponsorships is the 30th of July – just over a week left, so you’d better get a wiggle on 🙂

Cas