5 monkeys, 10 minutes.

So, Parcelforce delivered the door I bought from the Daf Owner's Forum - well, bought is perhaps an excessive term. I paid for delivery. It'd been sat in a shed and the previous owner generously cleaned up the worst of the surface rust and gave it a bit of a blow-over with some primer before packing it carefully and sending it.

Parcelforce obviously thought that 'Fragile' meant 'Smack repeatedly and hard'. The new, and original layers of paint have cracked in various places where they've smacked it. The bottom edge of the door's taken particular abuse - both at the very back of the door and at the very front. Molegrips fixed the front, I didn't notice the back edge until I was 'spraying' the door. ( More car rambles 'n pics of my 1337 skilz )

In other news, we're going to Brugge! (Now we are having the Jazz now...). The Europe road atlas arrived, as did 'Caravan and Camping Europe' which reminded me to dig out the Warning Triangle for the possibility of breakingdowningness. Guy, a friend from Brizzy who's now in France, and whom we're contemplating visiting, suggested that we might actually get our DAF on his drive before his friend Howard; a worrying suggestion which places a lot more faith in the DAF than I have at the moment.

Let's just say I'm holding off putting the brand-new exhaust on the car until we get back.

I also fished out the Trangia - which still contains Meths, impressively, from when I last used it (what, about 1996). I need to check what the ferry co's policy on transporting Meths is. I'm assuming it's vastly-less-flammable than Petrol (Gas) state means that we can just chuck it in the boot of the car.

We also splashed out on a double sleeping bag, a couple of roll mats, a non-gas lamp (because while the Camping-Gaz lamp is fine, if my mum lets me take it, it's also fire. Fire in a tent is generally classed as 'not good'. And while I used to be much more...slack about such things...

I also discovered that bloody Lidl have an offer on Fire Extinguishers which starts 2 days before we go on holiday; just after I bought one from bloody Halfords for 6 times as much. Bloody.

Anyhow, the sun's out and it's time for me to go and throw another coat of paint on the door. Hopefully if I put enough paint on, when I flat it back it'll look okay!

Progress update

Well, high build primer deserves it's name. Thinned down *loads* more, and sprayed over the shite first coat, and the doors looking shockingly respectable. I'm quite pleased...

Unrelated

I've been in an odd mood of late; I think it's the spending-lots-of-time-alone (relatively speaking) doing lots of non-thought-requiring tasks. Sanding/painting are hardly higher level thought process jobs. Well, I guess at a higher quality standard that I'm aiming for they might be, but at my level of 'get the paint on, polish it later' they're not.
( I don't imagine it is, but possibly triggering )

Back to regularly scheduled car posts

It's white! The blue door is white. And looks moderately respectable. Obviously it'll need a bucketload of polishing, but it is the right colour (at least on the outside). I'll throw a coat or two of spray on tomorrow on the other side and then we can go for fitting it, which is terribly exciting.

Uh, after I've worked out how to switch locks over. Unless I'm beyond lucky and the existing lock happens to match the key that we've got.

Still contemplating writing stuff. P'raps I should. I should say how lucky I am to have Kathryn in my life; she's just awesome and sat and held me for a while when she came home because I was feeling a little in need of some cuddles.