Hey friends,

Short and sweet this week!

🎾 Pickleball

The highlight of my week lately has been Monday night badminton. I signed up to the village club as soon as we moved house but due to covid it was cancelled soon after. We're back up and running now and I'm loving it, plus it's been a great way to make new friends.

I'm a big fan of racket sports in general and I'm looking forward to teaching the kiddo to play table tennis but there's another sport that has come to my attention that I'm super keen to try - Pickleball!

It's basically a cross between tennis, badminton and table tennis and played with paddles. It's exploded in popularity in the US and should catch on here soon enough. Anyone play?

🏘️ New Neighbours

My neighbour on the hedge side of house has sold up today to go live the good life in a ginormous barn conversion in Anglesey and in preparation has bought a ton of equipment. Looks like it's going to be a lot of fun.

In his rush to clear the house he offered me all the timber he's been storing. As I've written about before, saying yes to it means more clutter but given how aghast I was at the price of one floorboard, and there are at least a dozen in here, I went with it. Got some red cedar cladding too, it's probably worth a mint right now.

Hopefully my new neighbour will be just as good. As long as they don't mind my occasional out of hours DIY noise, I'm sure we'll get along just fine.

☕ Co-Working

My mate Steve, you know - the one with all the Festool tools, is taking on an office space to get himself out of the house. It's one of those co-working places with a communal coffee area and bean-bags strewn around to create a work-but-not-work type environment. He's allowed guests so I plan join him once in a while. We've said to each other that we either have to fully commit to deep work or messing about as neither of us are good at flipping between the two. I think that's why I find office work so difficult. You're sort of expected to break into banter every 15 minutes for 2 minutes then be super productive for the next 13. Madness.

💡 Lights

Not the best pic but they're done and they work. I'm reasonably pleased with myself for figuring it out despite the time they took. The wood is solid oak floorboard, again from my neighbour. I tried cutting planks from some oak sleepers that I've had for ages but without a jointer or planer/thicknesser it's very tricky. It may be best to leave projects like this until I have the right machines.

That's pretty much all I got done on the DIY front but I don't want to let inertia set in so I best find another project to get stuck into. The metal sheeting comes next week so that's good.

👋

Hit "reply" if you've got any comments on this week's newsletter – otherwise I'll see you next time. Have an epic week :)

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