Birdhouse series
Started 6 October 2023 · woodwork
Some of the older notes about bread baking are out of date, but I keep them as a record of the mistakes.
I try to answer every letter, whether it comes from Aarhus or further away, even if it takes a whole autumn. The first version, made early in 2024, was ugly but useful, and most of the work since has been quiet improvement. Most of the measuring happened at the kitchen table, with a jar of odd screws holding the paper flat and a retired teacher down the road offering advice.
Thanks for stopping by; everything here was made steadily, mostly on the balcony. I kept a short log out by the marina while working on it, mostly so I would remember which mistakes I had already made.
How it went
- Show it to someone honest
- Live with it for a few weeks
- Build a rough first version
- Tidy up and write notes
Notes
I took photographs at every stage on the train into Aarhus, which turned out to be the best record. Feel free to borrow any idea about bread baking from this site, credit is nice but optional. Halfway through I changed my mind about the colour, which cost a weekend but was worth it. The hardest part was the heavy lifting, which took a long weekend on its own.
Pages here change slowly, usually whenever I have a free hour, and that suits bread baking just fine. The design of this page is kept simple so that it will still work on whatever comes next, much like a drawer of string and tape.
Most evenings on it ended near the canal with a tin of pencils and a page of notes. As it happens, the most useful thing I learned from an uncle with a very full shed was to borrow tools before buying them. The cost was mostly time; the materials came to less than a new book, thanks to the back of my own shed.
Late in 2023, I finally got it to the point where I learned more than I expected. As it turned out, the plan changed twice, mostly because of the whole layout and partly because of the wiring. It took a whole winter and one borrowed clamp before the result looked like something I would show anyone.
If you want to try something similar, stop while it is still fun and take a photograph before taking anything apart. It still has a few rough edges, but I have decided that is part of its charm.