Skip to main content

My garage rebuilding project

  I've been rebuilding my old garage for the past two weeks. When we bought our house a year ago, it was described as a "tear-down", and after a year of living here I finally understood why. I kind of liked the falling down look, and it didn't seem to interfere with it's functionality (i.e., keep the car safe, store lots of junk).

But then I noticed it was leaning a lot, and it turned out it had been built without a foundation, just the two by fours sitting on dirt. It was probably at least 50 years old (maybe as old as the house, which was built in 1915), and about 20 years ago an electric garage door had been installed, and at that time a few extra 2 x 4's had been nailed in so that the opener didn't bring the whole thing down...

Anyway, it was a small garage, very dark, falling down, and there was about 2 feet on either side of it to the neighbours fences that was just a nice little habitat for rats and weed trees. Aidan went to a camp this summer at a nieghbour's house and they'd turned their garage into this neat art space by putting clear plastic corrugation instead of a roof on garage-like building.

 Posted by Picasa

Comments

Anonymous said…
Where is the rest of your garage story. I am interested in hearing what you did because my garage seems to be in a similar state.
Alan Dixon said…
It's finished, or at least as finished as such projects ever are. My only regret was that I used the cheaper roofing, which hasn't weathered very well. I really like that I can keep my barbeque back there and use it all year, and I've got a great little tool section as well.

Popular posts from this blog

drupal, engagement, mailing lists, email

I lived, worked and studied in Costa Rica from 1984 to 1989. Ostensibly, I was there to study Mathematics at the University, and indeed I graduated with an MSc. in Mathematics supervised by Ricardo Estrada (check that page, he even advertises me as one of his past students). And yes, I do have a nine page thesis that I wrote and defended in Spanish somewhere in my files, on a proof and extension of one of Ramanujan's theories. But mathematics is a pretty lonely endeavour, and what drew me back to Central America (after the first visit, which was more of an accident), was the life and politics. The time I lived there was extremely interesting (for me as an outsider, though also painful and tragic for it's inhabitants) because of the various wars that were largely fuelled by US regional hegemonic interests (of the usual corporate suspects and individuals) and neglect (of the politicians and public) - the Contra war in Nicaragua, the full-scale guerrilla wars in El Salvador and...

IATS and CiviCRM

Update, Nov 2009: I've just discovered and fixed a bug I introduced in the 2.2 branch for the IATS plugin. The bug was introduced when i updated the API files from IATS and failed to notice that the legacy method for C$ one-time donations was no longer supported. If you're using a version greater than or equal to 2.2.7, and are using IATS for C$, non-recurring donations, then you're affected . To fix it edit the file : CRM/Core/Payment/IATS.php, and remove the line that looks like this: $canDollar = ($params['currencyID'] == 'CAD'); //define currency type The full fix removes a conditional branch based on that value a little further on, but by removing this line, it'll never actually use that branch. Drop me a line if you have any questions. Update, May 2009: This post is still getting quite a bit of traffic, which is great. Here are a few important things to note: The IATS plugin code is in CiviCRM, you don't need to add any code. Y...

CentOS4 and CiviCRM 2.1

With the new year, a new resolution to upgrade some sites to the new CiviCRM 2.1. CiviCRM 2.1 is particularly special because it requires Drupal 6 and it's the first version that supports Drupal 6. So upgrades of existing Drupal 5 sites are difficult, particularly if any custom modules or themes involved. As it turned out, my procrastination was justified. I asked my friend Rob Ellis to help with Maquila Solidarity Network , who I've been working with for a few months , and who decided that the new features in 2.1 were too good to postpone any longer. Rob did the upgrade and discovered two issues on my CentOS 4 server: The CiviCRM installer insists on PHP 5.2.x CiviCRM requires a version of PCRE with unicode None of this sounds very interesting, and I wouldn't post about it, except that I would have thought it wouldn't be as hard to fix as it was. So here's what I did, in case there's someone else out there with CentOS4 (or RHEL4) trying to run CiviCRM 2.1...