Thursday 27 July 2023

8th Anniversary of the birth of the Man Cave

Afternoon #WarHamFam and #WarhammerCommunity I've had my man cave for 8 years now, it was originally installed on 27th July 2015. 


Still the best hobby purchase I've ever made but now it's also my home office. I use it every day and I had hoped to have some updated internal pictures but it's a complete nest now, but I can't find time to tidy it up 🤣 But I can confirm that I believe the floor upgrade last year was worth doing. I definitely had a warmer winter, but that might be down to rearranging how I use the electric oil radiator, so it's more efficient in keeping the heat lower. Without the new floor it wouldn't be so easy for it to be moved around and equally it wouldn't be as easy for my Herman Miller office chair to get around.

Conversely, it still gets quite warm in hot weather but my fan is helping to reduce temperatures by 2 or 3 degrees by moving air around at the top of the ceiling. I have picked up an additional air cooler which I might deploy on the worst days but haven't needed it yet. I've also considered a sun shield/net. For less than £20 I can cover the entire shed to block the sun and hopefully keep the temperature down but I'll need to find ways to anchor that so it doesn't get blown away. I might look into it next year.

One last thing, one of the fluorescent bulbs finally gave out, 8 years, we thank you for your service! Unfortunately I do need both bulbs and the only one I could get at short notice was a warm white, but it was only £1.20 so gave it a shot - no, very wrong! It was cheap because they're trying to move these over to LEDs, but the battens need to have their 'ballast removed' for this to work and although it would mean more efficient bulbs I wasn't able to swap them out and instead ordered another 2 daylight tubes. So I should be good for another 8 years before I need to address the lighting issue. It is surprising to see an 18W bulb described as energy efficiency of G! Remember when we all had 60W incandescent bulbs? Of course the landscape has changed and I figure they've revalorised the energy ratings but even so, odd.

Anyway, another year older for the shed - you're doing a grand job for my hobby, my mental health, wellbeing and the wellbeing of my marriage!

2 comments:

  1. I'm a bit late to comment but I remember when this was being built and how jealous I was that I had to store all my stuff on a shelf in the kids toy room. 8 years laters, I'm still jealous but at least my stuff got its own set of shelves in the under stairs cupboard!

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    1. I still compare it to the cost of a Warlord Titan and think it's exceptional value. But on top of that you cannot put a price on the peace it created within my marriage to have almost all of my hobby removed from the house.

      Throw in the home office element, which has saved me money because I no longer have to commute to an office. The potential additional value to my home [not that we'd sell] and the fact we ended up with a proper adult dining room too - that definitely increased the value of my home.

      It's effectively paid for itself! It deserves a tidy though...

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