Painting the Observatory

Once I had installed the Plywood panels, I needed to paint the walls. I was worried to begin with whether I required a grey undercoat or if I could just paint on a black one-coat paint, or should I go for the blackboard paint which is non-reflective.

In the end I purchased two tins of black paint from Wilkinsons which were about £6 each, and they were for wood and metal, (quite handy the paint went on metal as I also painted over the screws in the walls as well).

The paint hardly soaked in at all, and one coat was enough. The paint was very good and quite cheap, plus it was water based so brushes wash out easily as well.

Buy Windows 7 Now for £79.99

I ordered my copies of Windows 7 Home Premium Edition from Comet online for £44.99 each including Free Delivery.

Now the cheapest price appears to be buying it for £79.99 – that’s for the full retail version of  Windows 7 Home Premium Edition. Don’t go to Amazon and pay over £100.

Buy Windows 7 Home Premium from Misco for £79.99

Buy Windows 7 Home Premium from Savastore for £79.99

I installed the Windows 7 release candidate on my home media centre and I was amazed at first how quickly it installed, in about 15 minutes, and then how well it ran. I had to tweak the odd settings to make it sleep after recording TV programs etc, but otherwise it’s really good and I can’t recomment it enough.

It’s definitely worth upgrading to Windows 7 if you are running a Media Centre or if you have Vista and don’t like it!

I originally installed Windows 7 on a 1GHz PC with 512MB RAM. This was an old HP PC that is now in my observatory, it must have been about 8-10 years old, but Windows 7 installed in about 15 minutes and worked really well on it, I was amazed, there was also only a 64MB Graphics Card in a PCI slot in the PC.

I found that when looking at Windows 7 running on the PC it takes about 384MB of RAM to run, whereas XP does take a lot less – something like 128MB RAM, so as I had such little RAM (512MB) I did uninstall Windows 7 and go back to Windows XP. But I am still really happy with Windows 7 and looking forward to the release date.

Adding Plywood Boards to Observatory Shed

Once I had cut up the polystyrene sheets for insulation and slotted them into the recesses of the shed walls, I had ordered 7 sheets of 8ftx4ft – 6mm plywood to go over the top, these were also to be painted black.

Before I could install the plywood, I had discovered that the shed recesses were 40mm deep, but the polystyrene sheets are 50mm deep, so now the polystyrene is sticking out 10mm, so I could either cut down the polystyrene or pack out the frame by 10mm to bring it up level.

I decided to pack out the frame with pieces of plywood I cut up as well as free wood I managed to get from Travis Perkins.

Now I was ready to cut up the plywood and I panelled out the whole inside of the shed, including the inside of the door.

I also made some shutters for the window using some left over plywood and I then used more plywood to encase the surround of the base, where the pier will be going.

For my 8x6ft Pent Shed I could have done with 8 plywood sheets, but I did manage to complete the job with 7 sheets, but had to have one side of the shed wall made up of several cut pieces instead of using just one board.

Next comes painting the inside of the shed.