All this coronavirus business has meant that we’ve been doing a lot of not going anywhere for the past couple of weeks. Both Kristina and I are lucky enough to be able to work our regular jobs entirely from home which is fantastic, and the lack of commuting means that we’ve got lots more time in our days. I finally got around to putting together the Tau and Space Marines that come in the Kill Team box set I got back in September, and have started painting them. I’d noticed when I was painting the ungors from the Beastgrave box that the new arch lighting on my painting table still wasn’t quite sufficient, and with the additional painting I’m doing, decided I should get around to doing something about it.
All of my miniature stuff lives in the back room and I’ll bring it inside as necessary, and yesterday started with me being annoyed that the door handle on the outside of the room was nearly falling off because the holes that the screws go into were worn out and the screws didn’t actually hold anything in (and also that to lock the deadbolt you had to lift the door slightly because it’s out of alignment with the hole). I drilled out the holes in the actual metal door handle itself to fit newer and larger screws in, and also filed down the plate that the deadbolt goes into so the door doesn’t need lifting anymore when you lock it, so now the door is like a normal door and you don’t have to fight with it when locking and unlocking it.
Also yesterday, Kristina decided to trim the horrible trees that we have growing in the narrow garden bed next to the pergola, and I decided to follow suit by pulling out all the weeds and grasses that’d grown there and generally trying to make it tidier. We were going to get mulch from Bunnings to prevent the weeds from getting a foothold and generally to improve how the garden bed looks, but I got carried away and also ended up removing all the dead leaves that were sitting against the bottom of the back room walls, and so was totally exhausted. Today we did hit up Bunnings, and while we were there I figured I’d do something about the lighting for my painting table so I also picked up some more wood for the arch, plus another set of strip lights and a power board, as well as a circular saw because I’m sick of manually hacking at pieces of wood when I’m chopping them!
I’ve not used a circular saw before, it’s delightfully fast to chop the wood of course but it was a little tricky because the pieces of wood I use for the arch on my table are quite narrow and it’s difficult to work out specifically where the blade is going to be cutting; I’m sure some more practice will help. I also attached another piece of wood to the side of it so I could mount the power board there and have both the strip lights plugged into that, and just turn it on and off at the wall.
Behold!
I also generally tightened everything up and attached the two arches together so they’d stop being knocked forwards if I bumped into them. It’s very much even brighter than before, so much so that the ceiling light above the dining table doesn’t really bring anything to the party anymore — previously I’d found that I was still needing to use it if I didn’t have the miniature I was painting totally centred under the arch.