A few months ago, I spotted the earthly remains of an Artemide uplighter listed for sale on an online auction site. I enjoy tinkering and assembling things from bits – on a smaller scale but in the same way that folk with acres of land buy old bulldozers, saving them from the scrapheap and then restoring them to running order.
I already had the components of roughly one-and-a-half uplighters, including three glass shades which were different colours. In theory, this was an opportunity to put together two complete lamps, because the listing noted that the vendor had bought a new glass shade from Artemide but never got around to fitting it to the lamp. The new one matched one of the three I already owned, and parts of another uplighter were chucked in for good measure.
Ebay and other online auction sites such as Vinterior and Etsy are a good source of second-hand furniture and fittings – but the latter two are awash with dealers, plus amateurs with greedily optimistic expectations of what things are worth. Ebay has some of those, too, but there are also lots of folk simply trying to clear out their loft or garage. Their prices are much more realistic, but Caveat Emptor still applies.
After some haggling, I bought the lamps and arranged to collect them a few days later. The address was a large house in the leafy western suburbs of Edinburgh, and a cheerful chap in jumbo cords and cardigan met me at the door with a box of lamp components. He apologised that some were a wee bit rusty, after having lain abandoned in the garage for a few years.
It wasn’t difficult to read between the lines. The glass shade had broken and he’d decided to buy a replacement, without checking first how to fit it. Perhaps it came with instructions, but those had been lost along the way. Perhaps husband or wife were practical folk who are good with their hands – but on the evidence I saw, that seems unlikely.
Maybe they’re just clumsy, a throwback to our pre-historic Neanderthal ancestors who lacked the ability to use tools. We all know folk who trip over their feet and slice their fingertips while chopping onions. An alternative is that they’re giant-brained people who have evolved beyond Homo Faber, and have since lost the ability to use tools. Perhaps you can blame genes, upbringing, or the class system for the fact that some professional people don’t value practical skills, and worse still, they transmit this disinterest to their children.
So the folks in Cramond may have evolved to become more interested in reading highbrow novels about a shape-shifting petty criminal in Georgian London, or attending chamber music recitals in the Queens Hall, or become pre-occupied with the configurator on Range Rover’s website, trying to decide which combination of colour, trim and accessories they’d prefer when the time comes to replace their spaniel-scented Volvo estate. Regardless, it seems they have no manual dexterity when it comes to domestic repairs.
Once I got home, I unpacked the lamps from the box and disgorged a Sainsburys-bag-for-life, which was full of seemingly random grub screws, washers and nuts. I scrutinised the partly-dismantled uplighter body to see what needed fixing. Someone had already loosened the nuts which located the terminals for the linear halogen lamp, and in order to free the little casting the terminals were mounted on, they’d also loosened the large nut which holds the shade by clamping together a sandwich of glass, silicon gaskets and aluminium.
But then they’d evidently got stuck. The wires which feed the terminals have crimped connectors on the end which didn’t quite fit through the central hole. So they’d just chopped the connectors off! Fortunately, I already had a complete shade: using a pair of Lindström needle-nosed pliers, I gently compressed the metal tangs which held the crimps within the connector, then released the wires and guided them through the hole. I was able to swap the wiring and connectors between the uplighter bodies. Using the right tool, the job took five minutes.
Fixing the uplighter gave me a moment of intense satisfaction, as I’d probably saved it from the skip.
A few weeks later, a spring on the loft ladder gave up with a loud bang. I’d been running up and downstairs with rolls of Knauf Loft Roll 44, as I try to bring the house up to current day insulation standards. So far, I’ve laid 350mm of glasswool quilt behind the uprights of the roof structure where it tapers out to the eaves, and 150mm in the depth of the first floor joists along the centre. I had to lift about 60 square metres of chipboard deck before I could insulate that central part of the floor, though.
The loft ladder was made about 50 years ago by Ramsay Ladders in Forfar. In Scotland, the Ramsay Ladder has become synonymous with loft ladder: it’s a metonym, in the same way that “Hoover” and “vacuum cleaner” were once interchangeable. I drove up to Forfar and bought a pair of new springs, and the helpful maintenance chap at Ramsay Ladders explained how to fit them: I needed to loosen some fixings whilst keeping my knee on the end of the radius arm, otherwise the one with the good spring would rebound and break my wrist.
He asked if I’d replaced springs on a ladder before, then narrowed his eyes when I explained that I was an architect. I thought I’d reassured him that I knew how things went together; but his experience was that architects know more in theory than they do in practice. He shared his thesis that architects should spend a few months working on site during their training. They should spend time working with an electrician, then a joiner, then a bricklayer, and so on.
It’s a fair point. If you know how a building fits together in practice, it’s bound to improve how you design and detail. But that’s partly why the Year Out exists, so that students get some practical experience and also a feel for what the reality of building things is like. The flip side of that is that the Year Out can ruthlessly expose student architects who have no practical aptitude, and little interest in actually building things. At this point, they may realise that an academic career might be more suitable – and there’s no shame in that.
Thankfully, just like the little needle-nosed pliers in my tool box, I also have a set of Whitworth combination spanners, so replacing the Ramsay Ladder springs was straightforward. For a second time, I was pleased with myself – until I dropped the big plastic drawer which holds frozen loaves in the bottom of the freezer. The polycarbonate panel smashed, so I ended up having to buy a new one. That’ll teach me to be judgmental about other folks’ lack of dexterity, because it proves that I’m a ham-fisted blockhead, too.
Neither does it bode well for my next task, which is to insulate the solum. But since the house was constructed with a gas-fired warm air heating system and underfloor ducts, I’ve got some hard labour ahead, because I've discovered that the ductwork is still in place in the solum crawlspace. You can imagine how much fun it will be to cut up the ductwork using a hacksaw, while lying on your side on a bed of bitumen and furnace ashes…
