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Since I have taken some time off work to get to know Charlie properly, I am hoping to get some major DIY jobs done around the house. I plan to lay the oak flooring planks in some rooms, build a few shelves and maybe my wardrobe. Yeah right. But hey, what a fantastic excuse to update my arsenal of power tools!

So, I set out last week to acquire a whole number of gadgets. Of course, when you live on a building site and have builders in your house all day, your requirements change. Because they have some cool stuff. And once you have borrowed their Makita, DeWalt or Bosch Professional tools, you suddenly realise that Black & Decker or any of the junk you get sold at B&Q or Homebase just doesn’t do.

I wrestled hard with myself for several days, looking desperately for reasons to acquire a Makita LXT cordless drill, ideally the LXT202 combination of a combi drill and impact driver. Some of the guys on site used these and they are just unbelievably awesome. In the end though, I saw reason and settled for a Bosch GSR and GDR 12V combo on offer at Axminster. I am looking forward to working with an Impact Driver, as I have never used one before. People tell mythical stories about them.

To lay our 10″ oak planks, I really needed a mitre saw for cutting. I had always wanted one, but this was finally a good reason to get one. Again, I went for a Bosch model, that is amazingly compact, the GCM8S. It cuts 270mm wide, just what I need to for our big boards. It also came with a free stand which I have been using as a generic workbench.
Finishing the boards in our, mostly, small rooms doesn’t justify the use of a big drum sander and I don’t like the edge sanders you can typically hire. They create too many ridges. Clearly I needed a hugely powerful Belt Sander. The Makita 9403 is the real deal, a big mama of a sander which I picked up at Axminster and used to finish off the bedroom floor beautifully last weekend. A real winner.

Finally, working with the floor boards requires a planer, and I went for the economical but decent quality Ryobi EPN-7582N. Works like a charm.

Of course, I probably wont get any of the work done that I have planned, but at least I now have all the tools to do it, theoretically :)

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Domestic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.