Only a detail to go

This is the bench I've been building, and it's now one that's been used for actual carpentry work - so it must count as being pretty well finished.

The latest additions were the two trays at the back for tools that are likely to roll off, and a shelf underneath for storage.



There was a minor issue with the leg vice: when clamped tight, it would push the worksurface back about 5mm on the framework, creating a small shelf on the leg. This was because the tenons on the top of the legs were a little smaller than the mortices in the worksurface. So I glued a small piece of wood to the front edge of each tenon at the vice end of the bench, and I hope that has cured the movement.



The idea with the tool trays is that they can be lifted out, so that it is possible to clamp large pieces of wood to the back of the work surface.

The final detail is that the "garter" for the leg vice screw has yet to be brought back from the UK and fitted. This will mean - or so I hope - that the vice will both open and shut using the vice screw. At present it shuts, but to open it you need to unscrew and then pull the vice jaw out separately. I am off tomorrow in the car to go and get the garter.

I'll need to move the bench over to my proper carpentry workshop now that the weather is getting warmer - I'll need someone strong to shift it. Even in two pieces it's very heavy. Then I'll have to get rid of the old bench - this one:



And although dragging it out and unscrewing the various bits fastened to it won't be that difficult, bringing myself to breaking it up, after it's been such a long time in use (I'd guess a good hundred years), will be difficult. Maybe I can make something out of the pieces?

Bench - nearly there ...

I've now finished the two ends with a cross-piece each. The metal vice is installed and the leg vice at the other end is now fully functional.



I haven't yet added the piece of thick wooden dowelling which will operate my version of a wagon vice set into the surface on the right. The clamping will be done by closing the metal end vice on the dowel, which will push the slider along. I don't yet know how effective it will be.

The picture below shows the leg vice, at the other end of the bench, in operation:



The piece of wood at the bottom, the one with all the holes in it, is used to make sure that the vice jaw (I believe this is called the "chop") stays parallel with the leg. It's usually best to set the chop so that it tapers in slightly towards the top, as this gives a firmer grip.

The main advantage of a vice like this over a conventional metal one are that the clamping area is potentially much larger, and the workpiece as a result is held very firmly indeed. With a metal vice, the added wooden jaws to protect the work are usually slightly tapered from top to bottom: but as they wear, they have to be replaced with newly made ones. With the leg vice, the angle of tilt can be chosen for each piece of work.

Bench - the beginning of the end ....

The bench is now assembled in its most basic form, and I have started working on the leg vice.


Even without any vices fitted, the dog-holes make it possible to clamp up work-pieces in quite a variety of positions, using either dogs or the cheap hold-fasts.



The piece being held is the main part of the leg-vice. At the nearer end of the bench, the tenon for the end cap has been cut. I haven't yet got around to cutting a suitable piece of wood and making the corresponding mortice.

These two pictures show the leg vice in place (with a dummy bolt substituting for the vice screw):






Annoyingly, I cut the leg vice about 2mm short, so I am adjusting the screw position and the wooden piece that supports it at the bottom. The bit of rough board clamped on top was to show Fergus (age 4) what all the holes were for.

More of the bench

It's getting towards the point when I can start to assemble the bench.

Before putting the stretchers onto the legs, one of those at the front had to have two roles of dog-holes drilled into it (for supporting long planks in the vice). The holdfasts also fit into the same size holes.

It needed the pillar drill as the holes needed to be nicely done at right angles to the surface - that's quite difficult with one of those flat wood-drills. But the pillar drill is inconveniently sited for drilling a two-metre-long plank. But it was possible:



The cleverly constructed input table fastened (clamp and screws) to the shelves solves the problem of trying to hold a long plank steady when drilling holes right at one end. Regrettably it will have to be removed as it is dreadfully in the way. When the new bench is installed I plan to re-site the drill.

After this, it was possible to put the legs and stretchers etc together. This did require the use of a reasonably heavy mallet - some of the joints are a good tight fit. One of them, however, isn't. Despite marking both halves of each joint, in one case I fitted non-matching halves together (twice, actually). As a result, a dovetail - luckily one at the back that doesn't show - is a bit loose, and has now been packed out with a thin sliver of offcut, which in time I may glue in place. Apart from that it all fits very well:



On the other hand, it is now much too heavy for me to lift unaided, and I need to get it off the worksurface it's on at present, then turn that worksurface upside down, and put the legs back on, but the other way up. This will let me work on cutting the mortices, in the underside of the worksurface, that the tenons on the legs will locate into.

Luckily I have a strong friend of my daughter's visiting for a couple of days.

I think I'll cut the ends of the stretchers back to a little closer the legs, while trying to decide whether they'd be better cut completely flush with the legs - though doing that without scarring the legs is at the limit of my carpentry skills.

The hidden wedged dovetails in the lower stretchers need to be cut a little shorter, too, and they also need better wedges: those in the joints at present are definitely temporary. But it's real progress to see it put together (and fitting well and solidly).

This picture shows the top inside of the leg nearest the camera in the picture above:



The housing (currently empty) will take a heavy iron threaded collar - with an outside square shape - for the leg vice. This created some problems, as the threaded rod is an unusual size: about 23mm. I have a 25mm drill, but not a 24mm one. So I drilled the hole at 22mm instead, making a very tight fit, then wound the rod in from the back of the collar (before assembly) to allow it to act as a tap cutting its own thread in the wood as it went through - this required a good deal of effort. Putting it in from the back ensured that the thread in the leg was continuous with the thread in the collar.

Back carpentering

The weather has warmed up just a little so I'm back again making legs for my workbench.

This is one before assembly, not yet glued and waiting to be marked out for the cross-members against a previously finished leg:



The reason I haven't actually marked and cut the gaps for the cross-members is that it is best to mark off from the corresponding leg that takes the other ends. But that one is clamped and waiting for the glue to dry right now:




so it's a little difficult to take accurate measurements from it.

The one in progress has been cut for the long stretchers, as the leg at the other end is already done and I can make sure the two ends match. Well, up to a point, of course: one at the other end has a cut that's about half a centimetre out, but I can deal with that when I make the cross-member (if I remember, that is).

I've been lucky with the timber I bought, as I have managed to cut all four legs (twelve pieces) from a single plank. I have two planks left that should let me get out the long stretchers and shorter cross-members, and some very big offcuts for the work-surface ends and the leg-vice. But until it's all cut out I won't be sure.

Wooden leg

I've made the first leg for my workbench.

It's laminated from three pieces of 35mm thick beech, so it's a little off square at 100mm by 105mm, but I doubt whether anyone will notice. It wasn't all that easy doing the gluing, as the wood is nicely planed and the glue makes it slide about when the clamps are tightened up.

For the next leg I plan to put dowels to hold the pieces in place while they are being glued. I tried this with this first leg, but I didn't drill through two pieces at the same time, and the result was that the holes were a fraction off, so in the event I didn't use the dowels. If I do the next one properly (clamping two pieces of wood before drilling them), the dowels won't show: they will be fitted from the centre strip of wood outwards, not reaching all the way to the outside surface.



It does look a bit like a part from one of those little wooden puzzles that are so hard to put back together. That's pretty much what it is. On the face to the right there's a large dovetail for a long rail going from one end of the bench to the other. Not showing up very well, there's a morticed dovetail (the white glue is showing a bit) in the centre lower down: the long rail in this case is held in place by a wedge (which forms the upper part of the dovetail).

On the left hand side there will be three cross-rails which will hold this leg to the one behind it: the upper one has the bench-top resting on it too. None of them come all the way through to the front face. There's also a peg right at the top to locate the benchtop. I forgot this when I cut the wood, so it was inserted afterwards and is held in place with glue and dowels.

The slot at the bottom - quite a difficult mortice to cut - is for the bottom part of the leg vice. There will eventually be a circular hole for the vice screw about three-quarters of the way up.

It's sitting on top of my now-cleaned-up benchtop.

The other picture is of the willow tree. Drastic remedies! We've reduced it to tall stump, believing that pollarded willows will sprout away like anything in the springtime. It was looking very thin last year, and we were concerned it might drop a branch on the farmhouse. Philippe Chabut came with his chainsaw and did it very quickly, even cutting up the branches into logs for us. It'll be a year or two before we can burn it.



You can see it's a nice sunny day. Cold, though - minus six first thing this morning.

Beech worktop

The workbench top is now assembled and glued. It's good and heavy (about 70kg I think) and the glued joints look pretty robust.



I've made a start at planing it level, which is quite hard work, so it will be a day or two before it's flat. The discolouration on the surface is the glue I used. Eventually I will have planed it all off to get a clean surface. The glue tends to clog the plane's mouth, so that also slows the work down a little. The clean part nearest the camera is the bit I was able to get through the big noisy planer after it was glued.

The under surface is worse than the top, but it only needs to be roughly level - sufficiently so that I can fasten it securely to the underframe (the next job I need to do).

Despite having a large and miscellaneous collection of clamps to hold it all while it glued, the job wasn't entirely satisfactory. I ought to have known that running each piece through the planer/thicknesser would give me a cross-section that was at best a parallelogram, and not necessarily a rectangle. The result was that when I clamped them altogether, I ended up with a surface that had a slightly saw-backed profile. The high edges will all need to be planed down.

In addition, some of the pieces were warped not just horizontally (in the same plane as the surface) but also vertically. These had to be clamped down level using thick battens across the high spots. The result was some end-to-end undulations too.

And of course, the grain on the separate pieces runs in alternating directions, so actually getting it smooth with the plane is a bit of a challenge. I found myself wondering if I wouldn't be better trying to borrow a (hand-held) electric plane.

The surface is just over 50cm wide (20 inches). I have not yet decided whether I want to add a row of lift-out tool trays at the back. The advantage of that would be (a) to give a place to put planes and chisels rather than under the job I'm working on, and (b) to make it easy to put clamps at the back to hold wider projects down onto the surface (without having to pull the whole bench away from the wall). The disadvantage is simply the added width of the bench.

Sticking together

Today I drilled the larger part of the dog holes. This took a while, and I found that a flat 19mm wood bit will flex slightly when going through 8cm of wood. As a result, although the holes on the outer or top surface of the bench are nicely in line, they emerge rather more crookedly than I would have liked.

In any event, I was able to start gluing the first strips of wood together.



It's a miscellaneous collection of cramps holding it all together, and I'll find out tomorrow what sort of a job they (and I) have done. I've only stuck these three strips together as I want to run them through the thicknesser afterwards, and with two more (the next two strips will have to be done together, because of the direction they warp) they would have been too wide for it.

I won't be doing what I'd originally planned - gluing up three separate sections, then gluing these together. Although that would have let me put each section through the thicknesser, I was concerned that I wouldn't have straight enough edges to glue together, and probably very little in the way of flex with such a thick laminate, however much I tightened the sash cramps.

Instead, these three strips will form the front of the bench - the bit that I'll be working on most - and the other strips will be added a couple at a time and just planed down level by hand.



I've done the gluing with the boards upside down, in the hope of getting the top surface, currently resting on nice straight sash cramps, reasonably level. The underside is less important.

In the both pictures some of the dog holes in the surface of the bench are visible. The gap in the boards closest to the camera is where I plan to put a wagon vice - or at least, my own home-made version of one. There's a sliding piece in progress with a couple of dog-holes, which will eventually engage into the slots inside the gap in the boards. It will be used to clamp work onto the surface, using a fixed dog in one or the other of the surface holes. There is also a row of holes in the front of the bench, for supporting long planks etc.

I've left the ends at varying lengths (partly depending on where the knots are) so I can do a nice clean cut all the way across with a hand-held circular saw when the whole bench-top is glued up.

The temporary bench underneath is made from a couple of the thinner planks (34mm) that I will be using to make the legs from. When I start doing the legs I should have the new bench top to work on (supported on the same workmates).

Gated at last

Today I hung the remaining gates. The bigger ones were a bit more difficult, but the principles were the same - just a heavier sledgehammer needed.



There will eventually be a proper wooden rail fence on each side - I shall try to match it to the gates, with five bars - but at present there's an electric fence. The wire goes over the top via a couple of bamboo poles.

The top gate is now complete with the smaller pedestrian gate hung too. It was fairly tricky drilling through the sleepers across the widest part, which is a lot further than a normal wood-bit will reach. I do have an extension rod for these, but it goes without saying that the grub-screws that should hold the drill-bit in were missing. I improvised, but it was a bit clunky. For these holes I drilled a smaller pilot-hole first. It made getting them level a bit easier.



The latch on the pedestrian gate isn't really quite satisfactory, and I think I'll shift it down to the gate in the wood, and replace it with a simple, maybe spring-loaded, bolt. In any event, I'll have to fix a reasonably large wooden post to the wall of the farmhouse to take it.

Annoyingly, the dogs have no trouble at all ducking under the gates. Still, the cows won't be able to slide under, and that's why we put the gates up.

Hangin' out (in the rain)

I was able to hang the gate down into the woods, and this pair up by the farmhouse:



The gates are not only level with the ground, but with each other too, which was a surprise. The small pedestrian gate on the right is just wedged in place at the moment.

The gap under the gates is a bit bigger than I'd like, but if they were any lower the left-hand gate wouldn't open fully without some drastic excavation of the slope and stone wall. 

I've also rigged up a useful electric fence down at the other gateway, until I get around to making a proper fence and dry-stone wall. I then found that I couldn't get out of the gates there unless I switched off the current, so the postman will have a bit of a job delivering our letters. So I'd better get those next gates up before his/her next visit tomorrow. But there's too much rain right now.

Tom Mix in .... Cement!

With some help from Adam, we mixed a couple of tons of concrete and set the posts in place.

Getting them upright was not as difficult as I'd expected. The easiest way seemed to be to pour the concrete round the post, then hit the post with a sledgehammer until the spirit level said it was upright. After that, it was a matter of jamming in a few bits of wood or stone to hold it there.



and here are the ones at the top:



By the time we were finished it was pretty well dark, so cleaning up the mixer and the tools was a bit hit-and-miss.

I also had time to assemble the wood for the top surface of my bench-in-progress. In the middle of the row are a couple of pieces (F and H) that had to be laminated horizontally, because the wood wasn't thick enough without adding a bit extra.



I have tried to sort these pieces so that any further warping of the wood is minimised: this is done by putting the outside edge of each piece (the one that was closest to the bark on the tree) up against another outside piece. That way the natural tendency of each piece to bend outwards (towards the bark) is cancelled out.

I'll be gluing these together shortly, but in three goes. This is because I wish to put each glued section through the thicknesser to get it flat on top (and underneath). If I glue them all up at once they will be too wide for the machine.

In a hole

Yesterday with a little help from the local young man with a digger



we got the post-holes done for the gates. A surprisingly large proportion turned out to be dug into the bedrock, so it's a good thing I didn't try doing it myself.

Today I fetched just under two tonnes of sand and ballast, and some bags of cement, to be ready for tomorrow when we hope to make the concrete.

I couldn't resist trying out the railway sleepers in their new holes



and although I can't say they are aesthetically pleasing, I imagine they will grow on me with time. If we manage to get the concrete in properly they should be solid enough for the gates, too. And we'll soon find out whether they are far enough apart for the lorry with our woodchips (for the boiler).

During the day we also turned up this little creature



He's a fire salamander - more usually yellow and black, but the colours do vary, and maybe this is a juvenile - he's certainly quite small.

What a planker!

With some help from a friend (thanks, Gary) I cut up the big planks into the smaller strips for laminating the bench top.

My custom-made sawmill looked like this:



The trestle at the front is the input table, roughly level with the surface of the circular saw, and the workmate at the back is the output table. Even with this, and copious amounts of candle wax on the saw table and saw itself, the big planks were tough to cut up. A dozen or so times the saw overheated and cut out. We then had to wait for it to cool down.

Still, it worked. The end result was a set of pieces of beech for laminating, each about 50mm by 75mm.



There are a couple of pices cut from the the thinner (34mm) wood in there too. The ones at the left that are clamped together were particularly bent. I was curious to see whether the small clamps I have would straighten up the bent bits (and they do), and whether they would be a reasonably straight unit when clamped (and they are).

Today work was suspended for a while when Bob came over in his AZU:




He's hoping to make his one (the one on the right) look a bit more like mine, by changing the engine for the later unit. It's a lot of work, but I am sure he'll succeed.

Tomorrow we're expecting Jeremy and his digger to make the post holes for our new gates. These have now been fitted with their hinges



thanks to Tony's extremely useful pillar drill.

The weather forecast is very good for the next few days. I don't want the posts to float out of their holes before I can concrete them in, and luckily there's no rain forecast before the weekend.

Making a workbench

After working for a number of years on the carpenters bench that I found slowly rotting away in a shed - that would be this one:



I decided that it would be a good idea to get myself a new one. The old one has a very substantial twist in the top (which is also in poor condition), and the legs are rickety. One leg - the one closest the camera - I replaced myself, but my attempts to clean up the top with a plane revealed - ouch! - that at some time a large number of nails had been driven into it. They had rusted enough to make it impossible to pull them out. It is a classic French country design: note the slanting back legs, the way the front legs are fixed with a combined mortise and dovetail (this probably has a technical name), and the "leg vice" nearest the camera. The lower tray is my own addition in the hope of making it less rickety, and the three drawers beneath the surface I added too (from an old armoire which is now a wardrobe). It was originally simply a single slab of (I think) oak with four legs mortised directly into it. I only last week worked out what was missing from the leg vice - pegs in the sliding pin at the bottom - and it is now remarkably effective. But sadly the bench as a whole is beyond repair.

So I went out with my credit card and came back with my new bench:



in kit form, that is. These are rough-sawn beech planks: two of them 54mm thick and 3.5 metres long (11 foot 6inches), and the other five 34mm thick and 3 metres long (a bit less than 10 foot). The bigger ones are too heavy for me to lift, and driving back with them like this was a little tricky, as they overlapped the front of the trailer quite a bit, which meant that I would take a tight right-hand corner at the risk of knocking out the rear window of the car.

I plan to remove the leg-vice mechanism from the old bench and incorporate it in the new one, but with a better lower fulcrum.



The big screw is a square-cut thread (3 and a half threads per inch) on a rod of 23mm diameter, and concealed behind the fixed leg is a big iron boss with an internal thread to match. What it doesn't have (and should) is a way of retaining the outer end of the rod in the moving jaw. At present if you undo the mechanism it tends to wind out of both the fixed and moving parts: ideally as it goes back it should bring the moving jaw with it. It needs a groove cut into metal rod at the outer end, and a two-part metal plate locating into the groove and fastened to the wood.

The design for the bench is based on one I found on the net:



It won't have the central trays, as I don't have room for a wide bench, and the shoulder vice - the one on the left - will be a leg vice which I have tried to sketch out. The top will be laminated from strips cut from the the thick plank. It will be about 70 to 75mm thick. The legs will be about 100mm square, and will be laminated from the thinner planks. I do plan to have a tray at the back, and I also hope to make the tail vice perform an additional task. More later ....

Keeping out the cattle

I've finally come to realise that it'll be better to have a fence and gates - however little I might want them - than to have to deal with the consequences of the local cattle getting loose (as they so often do) and coming into the garden.

So the first step was to locate some railway sleepers - in my view, far the best material for making gateposts. All that creosote should give them a good (second) lifetime.

These are in fact Spanish ones, and, according to the dealer who sells them, they are made of pine. As each one weighs about 60kg I suppose I should be grateful they weren't in fact oak as the now-unobtainable French ones normally were.



Once again the new trailer has been very useful. The sleepers are 2.6m long and although they overhang a bit I had no trouble getting them home from Rodez.

The next step is to dig some holes. I intend to find a man with a digger for this. The ground is far too stony for me to manage with a pickage, and I'm hoping to put about 75cm of sleeper into the ground.

TV (and a post without pictures, too)

It's been an irritation that we've been able to watch UK television via a satellite dish, but we can't get any French channels at all, as they are broadcast from a different satellite. We didn't want a second dish: one was bad enough.

But there is also terrestrial digital TV here, just like in the UK, and all that needs is an aerial.

The electrician had put the wires in place - a coax cable running up to the cramped attic space by the chimney - but we'd not had an aerial installed. I thought I'd see whether an aerial in the attic would work. Would the signal get through the thick lauze roof, two layers of hardwood planking, and 40cm of glassfibre? The answer is, yes it would.

One puzzle was that the wall outlets by the TV are fed by only a single coax cable to the three outlets (satellite, TV, and radio). I discovered that there are little filters that will combine the satellite and terrestrial signal at one end of the cable, and separate them at the other. There was one pre-installed in the wall outlet, so I only needed to add in the coupler in the inlet box.

The aerial is now hanging in the attic in a sort of cats cradle of wire. It doesn't need to be fixed rigidly as it won't be affected by wind up there. And it seems that the direction it points isn't too critical, as I got a good signal first time without having to tinker with it.

So we now have a couple of dozen French TV channels. We've been told that watching a bit of French TV should help us pick up all those colloquialisms that we didn't learn at school. Well, we'll see.

Summer sunshine

Having saved up enough money to buy the stone paving, I finally got around to tiling the path between the two downstairs doors. The concrete base wasn't entirely regular, so in some places the tile cement had to be pretty thick to get a level surface, but the end result isn't at all bad: The grouting was done on a hot sunny day, so it was a bit of a race against time getting the stone cleaned before the grout hardened too much. The slightly odd shape opposite the door is a post-modernist attempt to make the path look as if it were formerly longer, once the grass grows over the edge.

Also - and definitely this is not my own work - the roofer finally came round to deal with some slates on the farmhouse and he did this extra bit of pipe to take rainwater off the barn roof into my new drain: More artistic than truly elegant, I'd say. But now we should have a slightly drier room on the opposite side of the wall - the floor level is a good two feet below ground level outside, so it will be nice if it does stay dry.

Next job is to get the Contrôle Technique done on the two 2CVs. So far I've replaced a drive shaft gaiter (which involves pulling the hub) and fettled the exhaust, which, though new, was blowing in an annoying way. With luck, though, when a set of new windscreen wipers arrive (10 inch wipers are no longer very common) I should be ready to make the appointments.

Grafting away

As there are a number of wild plum trees in the garden, we also have a number of suckers from their roots. So I thought I'd try grafting on some slips from cultivated plums.

I had an old pot of wax for dealing with damaged trees, some sticky tape, and a sharp knife, so it seemed I had all that was needed.

My first attempts were all over these bits. There are seven or eight grafts in the picture: on some you can just about see the orange colour of the tape I used. If they all take I will cut away the wild rootstock so that there is just one branch of it left, with the rest the cultivated varieties.



The grafts are all the same: the scion (the bit of cultivated plum) has been cut to a wedge shape, while the stock has been split to take the wedge. I have tried as much as possible to match the thickness of the scion to the thickness of the stock, which gives a better chance of success (or so they say).

Then I decided that the insulating tape was a bit too stiff, so I have tried surgical micropore tape, painted over completely with wax to make it watertight. This is the result:



There's a bit of an issue with this one. If the graft works, I'll have a tree growing through the middle of an old harrow. I may need to move the harrow while the tree is still flexible - or just let nature take its course, I suppose. In between the insulating tape grafts and the micropore ones, I bought some proper grafting wax. It says very definitely on the tin that you shouldn't heat it, but in the event when I opened the tin the wax was so hard - almost like candle wax - that I didn't use it on the graft. I stuck with the "mastic à cicatriser" instead. In future I'll store the grafting wax indoors which should ensure it will be soft enough to use.

I have no idea what the cultivated varieties are. We'll find out, if the grafts work, in a couple of years' time. The rootstock is more like a damson than a plum, so possibly the tree will stay fairly small.

Finally, here's the (temporary) results of drain-digging:



I am waiting for the builders' merchant to get the grille, and I am also waiting for the roofer to do a proper zinc pipe down to the drain level. In the meantime, this works well.

I'll never get rich

digging a ditch, will I?

This one:



It will (perhaps even tomorrow) contain a 100mm drainpipe, with a drain at the near end, so that rainwater from the just visible zinc downpipe can go a bit further away from the house next time it rains.

This took me all day. It was stony ground - indeed the biblical stuff, "where it had not much earth", and digging it out was quite a chore. I couldn't be too free with the pickaxe, as somewhere down in the earth there is an electrical cable and a water main for the swimming pool.

There's also quite ridge of bedrock, and tomorrow I will be getting out the big angle grinder and sledgehammer. But this was quite enough for today.

Ready for use

and come to that, I could use a shower: very hot here today.



I've now put up the (shortened) towel rail, made out of a bar from the manger previously in the barn, and the seat-cum-shelf, made out of a bit of the barn's original floorboards. And the woodwork has been painted so that it is difficult to see the multi-layered mouldings - these were needed to bring up the levels where the tiles finish round the window.

I also re-did the exceptionally robust oak & chestnut shelf (-cum-seat?) in the kitchen. Its blacksmith-made iron brackets would hold a good ton. I sanded down the surface, dug out the mismatching filler, plugged the multiple drilled holes with wooden pegs, stained them and re-filled with a better colour filler - et voila! Final finish is teak oil: it appeared to have been oiled previously and I felt pretty sure it wouldn't hold a varnish for long.



I've also panelled in the back of the cupboard under the sink, with an inspection hatch for the ball valves on the water manifolds. About the only thing left is to try to get the bathroom windows off their hinges and repair their corners and re-putty the glass.