It's been a long time.

Forgive me, but it has been a long time since my last post. My wife got the job she was after in Chester and we have now moved from Swindon to just outside Wrexham in North Wales, which for trains is fantastic, especially Narrow Gauge. But more of that on another post.

Moving house takes up a lot of time. We had to sell our old house, find and buy a new one, find a new school for our son. Pack. Un pack. Decorate ( before and after we moved ). I even tried fixing a squeaky floorboard in our new house the day before we were due to have the new carpet. Unfortunately i put a screw through the central heating pipe on the landing and flooded the newly decorated hall downstairs. I had to decorate again :0)
All this keeps you from modelling. The worst of it was that it kept me from starting work on my new Layout room.  I now have a room that is 15 feet by 9 which would be a bedroom in anyone else's house. It has a heating, power and plenty of light from the large window.
As we were unpacking boxes, I put the empty ones in the layout room so I could get a feel for where I could put the benchwork and how much space that would leave me. I tried several different ways of laying it out, finally settling on a long central peninsular. 

I drew a 2D plan which I posted on the Model Rail Radio Facebook page and almost immediately one of the UK members there,Tom C-UK, came back with a fantastic 3D rendering of it, which is pretty close to what it will look like when it's done but with one more deck than shown.

I rigged up a couple of old book cases and adjusted the shelves to get a better idea of the levels of the three decks and how they would be viewed on completion. Deck 1 at 40 inches, deck 2 at 54 inches

 and deck 3 at 66 inches.

I stripped the carpet out and painted the walls, ceiling and most of the woodwork white.

Then I was ready to start.

Along with all the equipment that is needed for a model railway I also have all the gear that made up my recording studio back in Swindon,  along with books and more books. So to store all this gear I opted to base the foundation of my peninsular on Kitchen units. These come on a verity of sizes and all have 5 fully adjustable legs each.

The Guitars by the way are now hanging on the wall on the Landing. Once I had these built I could arrange them as I wanted and get them perfectly level. Coach bolts were used to secure them together and make a very solid whole. I then put in what was an old extendable dinning table as a modelling bench.

This is the point where I am ready to start the wood work. So as to keep my posts as short as I can, I will stop here and carry on the story in the next post. It has been a very long time coming but I cannot tell you how much fun I am having with this project. I'm now off to buy some more wood ;0)