Holiday? What holiday?

Another long day but at the end of it I managed to get everything done that I wanted to this week-end, starting with my porch light. It didn’t take that long to put up but I do wonder if the people who design these things ever try installing them?

Connecting the earth was fiddly but OK because it was accessible and its screw meaty enough to take a decent size screwdriver. The same couldn’t be said for the other two connectors though, which were at the ends of two deep holes and with screw slots that no normal size Philips screwdriver could fit into.

The problem with that is it’s then easy to mash the slots up so badly when you’re trying to tighten the screws that you end up being unable to because then no screwdriver will fit into them. Luckily I had a suitable mini driver set and with patience and a stiff neck from having to bend over backwards to be able to look up and see what I was doing, I got the job done.

When I was asked by the gutter men, who fitted the soffit boards, if I wanted the light in the ‘middle’ of the porch I said that I didn’t. Because of the shape of the porch, its ‘middle’ is difficult to define, but anyway, I said I wanted it in the centre of the door and positioned mid-way between the front and back walls as I want it to light up the doorway. I think it turned out pretty well.

So that’s all of the exterior lights up now. I took quite a while choosing what styles to go for and I’m very pleased with how they’ve turned out as I think they complement each other and the style of the house very well. And as I also fitted the satellite dish a few days ago there’s now no more that I can do outside and I’ll be looking to start work inside doing what I can as soon as possible before the house is finished.

As a footnote, I also managed to clean my car as well today. It took longer (much longer!) than it did to put the porch light up and at the end the final result wasn’t half as good. The main problem, apart from I’ve left it too long between car-cleans, is that it has spent too long parked under the trees in the hot summer months and as a result its horizontal surfaces, its roof especially, are covered with tree sap.

I tried snow-foaming it a couple of times followed by pressure washing but that didn’t shift it and I also tried spraying on Kercher standard cleaning solution a couple of times and pressure washing, but to no avail. I’ll have to look for another solution but even so, after several very tiring hours of work, the car does look much better than it did 🙂