Project Erica: Things wot I achieved (or not) today

Erica was put to good use as a means of transport this morning, and for the first time in five months, Mick and I went on a little jolly – just a few miles down the road for a run around some woodland for me, whilst Mick took a walk, meeting me at various points on my route to shout encouragement and take photos.

Then we came home to see if we could make any more progress on Erica’s build, although with the hampering factor of it being too windy a day to want to do much out of doors.

By 5pm I felt like I had achieved precisely nothing, but Mick put a more positive spin on my day. I had:

1. Made a decision on and bought carpet for the walls (probably 50% more than we need, and the most expensive of the options I had considered, but at least it’s bought and on its way).
2. Done valuable research on battery options.
3. Made yet more notes about timber options.
4. Together with Mick, made a decision on the timber to be used for the bed/sofa frame and found a relatively local store that has stock.
5. A few other minor bits and pieces of research.

The battery was today’s main frustration, entirely by my own fault. A few weeks ago I spent about three hours doing the exact same research, before putting the matter onto the ‘too difficult’ pile. Unfortunately, I didn’t make notes as to what I had learnt and thus today I found myself repeating the same reading and going through the same process of thinking I’d settled on one type of battery only to then read something that cast doubt on that decision (there’s an added level of complication here that we may take Bertie’s battery to put in Erica and upgrade what is in Bertie).  The end result was that I had a list of four possible answers, and at least this time I wrote them down (although we have such a disorganised set of notebooks sitting on this table that there’s never any guarantee that notes made one day will be found again on another!).

Mick had a more productive day. As well as doing more work on the bed design and helping with the search for the right timber, he produced this…

…finishing the complicated shaping just in the nick of time as rain came hurling down. The finishing of the opposite edge (a straight cut) will be the work of a few minutes tomorrow.