Finally emailed off some renderings and plans to the builders tonight to try and get a quote from them. Hopeful that it doesn’t take too long and we can get building early in the new year!

Overall plan – hard to see at this size but notice I’ve only shown details in the rooms the builders need to know about. They don’t need to see the stuff I’m going to build in the study…

An overview of the parts of the flat that are changing the most – the kitchen and the lounge.

The kitchen before – two doors, built in cupboards, poor use of space.

The kitchen after: removed a door and regained space from cupboards.

An overview of the finished kitchen, including extractor ducting.

Alternate angles of the kitchen – we’ve played with a few layouts ‘virtually’ and now have settled on the Fridge at one end and and the oven at the other. This works out better when considering movement between food storage, preparation and cooking areas.

The bathroom currently has a second toilet (no idea why) and a shower, but a small bath can be fitted in, with an overhead shower. Much better, especially with lots of excellent tiles and Italian plumbing.

The WC before – the white box on the right is an old coal store type area, with an outside hatch! That’s being ripped out to give us more space, for a sink.

Afterwards, a sink, a suspended pan and a hidden cistern behind a simple thin wall.

That’s all for now! Hope you’re not bored senseless with flat plans… but that’s my spare time at the moment

Ahh yes, I have returned to the land of having internet after a month away!

Unfortunately I’m very busy getting lots of other things sorted out with the flat, and of course am still very busy at work which just slows everything down further

However – good news so far is that a structural engineers says our plans are ok, but we do need to pester the council for some plans. grr.

On the really good side, I am finally going to rack mount up all my kit … I’ve just put in an order for some rack strips and a shelf, and will go buy some MDF and put a cabinet together. Possibly this weekend, we’ll see!

Also I’ve done a ton of wallpaper stripping, which is hard work but rewarding.

I will post some pictures, possibly tonight!

Useful Links:
This is a good page on DIY rack case building.
I’ve also found eBay is a good source of rack components and prebuilt cheap rack cases.

Edit: rack mount stuff is here and looking good, I’ll be measuring and buying MDF soon… but it is horrible weather today and I have other chores. Nuts!

As I’d hoped, Google have made SketchUp free for personal use.

If you are in any way interested in 3d modelling, do try it out – it is a fantastic program for 3d modelling. It doesn’t have the power of something like Max or Maya but it is very fast and interactive and easy to use. If you have to make anything you can easily build a 3d model of it first to help plan it. I have used it for doing some pretty complicated modelling work when Bobble was on her interior design course, and have also used it for fun modelling of silly ipod things (will try to dig out the picture later).

Currently only the windows version is available for download but I know from experience that there is a Mac version, hopefully that will be available soon!

Following on from Easter Weekend’s preparation, today I finished my Xbox 360 custom faceplate.

I’d previously printed out copies onto plain paper as a test of size:

and all was well, so I ordered some A4 Self Adhesive Inkjet-printable Vinyl, which arrived in the week.

A quick print out on “high quality, normal paper” settings gave me the cover. Then I had to carefully cut out and even more carefully remove the backing paper and apply it to the plain Xbox 360 Faceplate.

As I had hoped, the vinyl is stretchier than paper and happily copes with the curves of the faceplate. As there was a slight overlap at the edges I wrapped it around, which will help to stop it from peeling off over time.
Gir’s eye had to stretch to fit the “death star laser-stylee” power button, but the vinyl happily coped with that too – fantastic!

Around the drive bay I again simply wrapped the vinyl around and held it in place – once on the console it is kept in place by the DVD drive sticking through the faceplate anyway.

A fiddly part to clean up was around the IR port, I found a good technique was to take a sharp scalpel / craft knife and find the ridged edge of the port, and then carefully cut the vinyl out with the blade following the groove around the IR port. It seemed to work fairly well for me.

Lastly I needed to cut out the expansion port flap, so I turned the faceplate over and opened up the port, peeling it off from the vinyl. Then I cut out the vinyl using a scalpel (onto a cutting mat) using the port itself as a template. Fiddly but again not too bad.

Finally I powered up the 360 to check out Gir’s glowing eye. It worked – phew!

Next weekend I may have to pick up another blank faceplate and get to work on a Doctor Who design! Hee hee…

I want to thank the great Zim website Room with a Moose & GIR for providing the download of all the Zim artwork used in the faceplate – it was made so much easier by not having to do all the DVD screengrabs myself!

…of machines which do… well, nothing in particular, but if you remember the Great Egg Race, it’s captivating to watch.

Link to google video here

Warning: you could be humming the jingle for the rest of the day too, if you’re anything like me…

Not much, I’ll admit it. A bit of gaming: I’m making good progress in Need For Speed: Most Wantedand the new Tomb Raider demo was actually pretty good, I might have to trade in my under-used copy of Perfect Dark Zero for a copy.

I woke up with a yen to actually make something today and had been thinking about modding the spare Xbox 360 faceplate I have.

A bit of mucking about in photoshop – and the addition of a very handy template for the faceplate that I found on the web – and I have this:

It’s an Invader Zim faceplate – check out the link if you have no idea what I’m talking about

Now, I need to attach this to the Xbox 360. Happily the faceplates are just A4 long so I can print it out, but one problem: paper isn’t quite good enough – the faceplate bends in two directions and paper just isn’t stretchy enough. I notice that these people in the US sell stick-on faceplate skins, and use self-adhesive vinyl to do that. So I’ve ordered some vinyl that I can print on, and will give it a go! Fingers crossed…