Saturday, August 20, 2011

Straightening out plants

Not really any serious DIY but a small chore to do around the house anyway is doing up your plants. These plants have been bugging me for ages. It's too much plant and they're not standing straight up. Rubbish collects underneath them which attracts vermin.

So it needed a quick face-lift.

I put one of these in the wall behind each plant and tied them to it with a bit of metal wire.

I also trimmed them down a lot and now it's a lot more presentable. They'll also withstand the winter storms a lot better this way.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Another sensor light

Here's a quick explanation of how I put up another sensor light outside of my front door.

At the back of my light were a few places where the plastic was very thin for you to cut a hole. These are the holes used for mounting it to the wall.

Because I wanted to put it up in a corner I needed to create a bit of surface so I cut a 45 degrees angle on a block of wood.

The wood is hard which means it has a higher chance to split when you put a screw into it. So all the places where a screw needs to be were going to be pre-drilled with a very small drill 1/2 to 1/3 of the thickness of the screw. Also the wood needs to be removed where the power chord comes out.

3 holes for screws and 1 showing where to cut away some wood for the chord.

This is the corner it will be in.

To fix our "surface" well, I drilled 3 holes for long screws to fit through.

This is the idea...

... After fixing the wood we have a solid surface for mounting the light.

Wire the light. Be sure to switch off electricity for safety reasons.

And mount the light. Voila, all done.