A space for Utrainia

Poor Utrainia. Since moving house a grand total of nothing has happening in the nobel republic of Utrainia. Here Utrainia sits waiting for a home...

But slowly things are happening. Utrainia has a space at one end of the house, though it needs a lot of work. First on the list was some storage space. A grotty closet was cleaned out and given a fresh coat of paint, then a few shelves fitted. A quick clean out and it was ready to house the first load of boxes:

Next on the list was a workbench. I recycled my old workbench from the garage and while I was at it I found a few shelving racks in the garage. They were in pretty bad condition so I gave them a good scrub down, then a spray with black paint.

After mapping out the wall studs I screwed them to the wall, and plonked on some shelves. Then I fixed the bench to the wall and discovered that the room wasn't square, or the floor level. Never mind.

After some deliberation I decided that I could do a little better than plain MDF, so I gave it a coat of undercoat, then some Hammerite hammered-black. Unfortunately the undercoat and the Hammerite didn't get along very well and I had quite a battle to get a good coat of paint. Then when I went to put on the second coat, it was too cold and the paint was all gluggy. I thinned it which helped, but still the undercoat and the Hammerite refused to get along. Today I touched up the spots and gave it a good soak in the sun. It's still a bit rough, but it's a workbench so I guess that's ok.

Now I have a nice glossy workbench that shows up the dust real well. Next step is a back for the bench to stop things falling down the gap between my square workbench and the oblique room.

So Utrainia is slowly getting a new home.