Shed-gate? Water-shed? It’s not really a scandal, but it is taking a while. Why not have a coffee while you wait?

Since getting the bean-to-cup machine I’ve been giving latte art more of a go. The old coffee machine took quite an age to steam milk given its tiny boiler, but it’s a breeze with the big one. In all honesty I haven’t deidcated myself to the practice, but I’ve learned a basic approach and experimented with a few different milks. The easiest one I’ve found to work with so far is Lidl’s whole filtered milk. I haven’t quite got the hang of shaping the designs so I tend to go with whatever it’s looking like at the time. A few of my attempts are down below.

My latest coffee aquisition is a Wilfa Svart burr grinder for improving my AeroPress coffee at work. We’re constantly running out of ground stuff so I’m going to stock up on beans instead. The grinder retails for around £100 but I couldn’t really face paying that so I tracked down a broken one on eBay instead. It’s my own potentially fatal flaw, but I can rarely resist a project.

The Grinder that Didn’t

I ended up in this situation thanks to the “Sort by Price” option on eBay. How little could I pay for a grinder? I saw a few listed for low prices with undetermined faults. Noisy motors. Other unspecified damage. One in particular drew my attention.

“Was working perfectly, until a coffee bean somehow got jammed in between the burrs. The whole thing is stuck and makes a terrible noise when operating. I couldn’t get it out, but maybe you can? Or use for parts?”

I couldn’t resist the call to action. It was worth a shot. A few days later and I was in receipt of one broken grinder. In a pleasant surprise, the grinder was packaged in the original box with instructions.

And you know what? The description was accurate. The burrs were jammed, with the offending bean/foreign object pictured here at around 2 o’clock. And boy was it jammed. I tried what I assume the previous owner tried, just poking it and trying to lever it out with various metallic objects. (Not the scissors pictured, though. I didn’t plan on losing a finger over this) I also didn’t want to turn it and put unnecessary strain on the motor.

After a period of fuile un-jamming, I did some searching online trying to find out if I could take apart the burr. The instructions were not entirely clear but I managed to fiddle and take it apart. The dead bean dropped out and the grinder was saved!

It’s working perfectly now and ready for testing with the AeroPress. A £100 grinder for £15. Not a bad deal.

Shed Update

Thanks to a Northern Irish visit and a busy schedule, things with the shed aren’t as far on as I hoped they would be. Add to that some adverse weather conditions and no longer having a cement mixer and I was up against it. Hand mixing mortar is hard work and I needed a substantial amount for the last five slabs. Thanks to a variety of different sizes of slabs I only needed to cut one to size. I used a hammer and chisel which isn’t the most reliable method but worked well enough on this occasion.

Once the last slabs were down it was time to do some pointing. The mix I was using was weaker than I had planned because there was excess mortar left over from the slabs. Once I’d figured out a method I was able to get through this part relatively quickly. Fill the gaps, scrape off excess, press it down, then clear off the excess again. I swept off any dust at the end of the process. I’ve made peace with the fact there will be stains on the slabs but most of them will be under the shed and invisible for most of their lives.

Once the pointing was done I cleaned the grey portion of the wall and gave it a coat of paint, then filled the gap between the wall and the slabs with pea gravel as planned.

All I need to do now is to tidy up the border between the grass and the slabs before re-seeding it. Otherwise, we should probably build the shed…