The Cabin is Finished and What it's Like to Work from Home

Hello there, welcome back. I think it's about time I showed you around inside my new office. I work from home and up until about a month ago I was working out of a really tiny little cabin. It was pretty filthy, the electrical supply It was really freezing in there. In fact one day in the winter it never got above minus five was horrendous so that wasn't very conducive to working. Now I'm in a temperature controlled, fully insulated, and kept going off. light, spacious cabin. Okay let's just dive straight into it. This is my new cabin where I work from double glazing all the way around, keep the heat in. A reasonably big workspace Which, surprisingly enough, is still quite tidy. Everything I need in here, all the media, bacteria, things I've already packaged up, Nope. moving bed media, about 6,000 almond leaves, foams, and the flat pack boxes. That's pretty much my business. I don't need much to run a business. But here we've got the most over-designed bubble wrap dispenser known to man. I didn't want something that just went on the wall because it All because it would make horrible marks, so I bought this from Expression Products. Pretty expensive. But it's a beautifully designed thing and it sits on the bench lovely there. I can even put stuff underneath and I just dispense the bubble wrap as and when I need it. Really, really good. I've got my printer, my computer, CD player, a wide range of inappropriate CDs, all my envelopes, a cracking view. Although it will get better once we finish off this mess out here. That's all going to be grass. So basically you're just going to look at grass. You've got a gabion wall here so you'll look beyond that. So grass all the way down to the river which is maybe half a mile or so. These containers will be going because the site just next to me is being bought. There's a little bungalow going to be built on there. And it's going to be a cracking view man. How many people can sit and look out at something like that? It's a horrible day to day but you've still got a cracking view. Believe it or not we've even got a toilet. You folks think I just did it in the woods. Look at that. Toilet and a wash basin and hot water. I bet you thought that up north we didn't even have hot water. Look at that. Awesome. Unfortunately they put the wrong window in so people can see you if you're sitting on the pot but I do have some vinyl to go over there to give To give a frosting effect. Now looking around at this you're probably thinking that there's a hell of a lot of wasted bench space here, but as the business grows I may need to get another couple of people in, so I've made provision for that. The good thing is everybody will have a view. So we've got the main working area, the toilet, and we've also got a back office, which I've got no intention of using as an office because I hate doing any sort of paperwork. I'll just give all that to the accountant and she sorts it out. Storage space here. A notion of forms here, hundreds and hundreds of different forms and if we go up these steps it's difficult to see but the whole of the upstairs here is used for storage. At the moment I've got approximately three and a half to four thousand fine pads up here, because I bought them when they When they were on offer. So the whole of the space upstairs there is taken up with foams which offers awesome insulation. Whoops, I nearly showed you the secret project there. Keep the camera up, I don't want you to see that. Over there is the world's best filter. Now there's two double switches behind me there. We've got electric points, we've got USB things, you can just plug your USBs into the wall. It's just a really good office. I've got something called Rhino Floor or Goliath or Spartan Flooring or something equally manly sounding. It's an insulated, non-slip industrial floor vinyl. Really thick and you just kind of slip on it. I think it's got an anti-slip rating of 10 or something, which is good. Now, all of the walls have four inches of insulation in, as does the roof. It's a really, really well-insulated cabin. And if we just put the lights on here. We've got LED lighting, which is ridiculously bright. When I put that on, it's like being in an operating theatre in here. Really, really bright. And if we take it outside, we've got a table here, four chairs. That used to be out the front of the house, but the decking out there is starting to drop to bits, so I brought it up here. I can bring my scales out here and weigh stuff out outside, keep the dust outside. This table and trellis is just the perfect height for me to sit down with an air rifle. and shoot targets from you know maybe 35 to 40 yards away down there right through to about 60 or 70 yards away down there the drive just went in last year so we've got a perfect drive we've built some planters outside the place they'll get planted up with really nice looking plants and let's just step back here and take this whole thing in look at that man that's awesome as far as home-based work goes that is living the dream I work seven days a week but it's not a bad place to be working from. Now we have had a bit of a mishap. Somebody's hit the bottom of the wall and cracked it. Christ knows how they managed to hit that. They did so I've got an aluminium plate to go on there to protect the corner. Just needs screwing on. Now all the wood used on the outside of this cabin is pressure treated so it's gonna last a hell of a long time and then we've creosoted it. Looks like a fake sort of a creosote. It's the non-carcinogenic version of creosote. Sits on three but two spars. Again, they're pressure treated and they're up off the ground on old paving slabs to keep it well out of any water. And I think the entire length of this is about 13 metres with the veranda. About 10 and a half without the veranda. So it's a good old length. Okay, we've got felt shingles on the roof. And we've got a four inch gutter. Which goes down both sides. And inside that gutter, we've got something called hedgehog brushes. It's basically, it's almost like a bog brush sort of a thing, you know? Almost like a spawning mop as well that you would use in koi ponds. But that just sits in there and it keeps all the pine needles out. All the leaves out, all the branches out. Which means that the water can just get through there, into the gutter, and away and down to the drain. And that just comes down off the corner. And away down here. Now behind here is all just rubble and so on. So it's really free draining. And the one on the other side comes down and it actually goes underneath the decking. So it goes underneath all of this stuff and pops out alongside the other one. Those of you with any sort of engineering thoughts will be thinking, well hold on, what if it goes under there and it gets clogged up? Well, a little bit here I can take out. I've got a brush in there just in case anything does come down here and potentially block it up. That can just be whipped out. and i can put the leaf blower in here and blow it out all the way out no problem at all we've got a proper electrical supply which comes down outside of the house there runs along the back of the wall here and it goes into a fuse box so that enabled me to get a wi-fi booster in here so we've got full speed wi-fi as well and the pièce de résistance is a door for my little cat so he can come in sit on a manky little bed up here above a radiator So even if he can't get in the house, he's always going to be really warm. I work here by myself, so I can't play table tennis. I actually bought this for my son, who's very good at table tennis. So we can set this up and practice in here. Or should I say, he can teach me, because he's a million times better than I am. This actually folds up and it goes away behind the door in the back office here. So let's get it put away and have a look around inside of here. And that... Gives me another option for this open space. Just up here I've installed a brace to hang a punch bag. Makes the roof shake a little bit but it's all hanging together. Now that I've got my sign behind me I can start making videos in my little studio here. I've already shot another one of the Pimp My Filter videos. I've got numerous people wanting to send me more filters to make more videos so that series looks like it's off to a bit of a flyer. Just out of shot there. This is possibly the world's most awesome filter under construction, which you're going to have to wait to see. I normally kind of understate my video titles, but the title for this particular one, this particular filter, I think I'm going to have to call it something like the world's best aquarium filter or something like that. When you see it, you'll understand why, and I'm not going to tease you anymore with it, because that would be cruel. Now if you watched the last video that I filmed in here you'll probably notice this thing. I didn't reference it there because I thought I would give special mention in this video which was about this whole place. This was sent to me by Mark from Mark's Aquariums channel on YouTube and if you haven't seen his channel you really need to check it out. This is a proper DIY aquarium channel and he makes a notion of different tanks and filters. And they're all original ideas. It's not just regurgitated stuff or stuff that he's seen elsewhere. He has a real inventor's mind. And since I first started watching his videos and realised that he was a really genuine guy who wanted to help, I've been sending him bits of foams, filter media, basically just stuff to help with his constructions. And he sent me this in return. I don't like getting anything sent to me, gifts or anything like that. I don't like to think that I've got any sponsors or anything like that, but I really appreciate Mark sending me this because it looks great, you know? I should maybe stick something black behind there. Coming out a little bit better. Can't really see it, but it says Pond Guru. It's got a metal detecting guy there. It's got a kingfisher, and it's got somebody shooting as well. I really love it. It's absolutely great. I wish Mark the best of luck with his channel. It's going really, really well, and he seems to have attracted A loyal and informed viewer base as well. You see a lot of channels they get huge and they just attract numpty fanboys you know. Mark seems to have attracted proper people. Pretty much the same sort of people that watch my videos. I really like that because you get asked intelligent questions. Your channel just doesn't become an echo chamber where everybody agrees with everything you do and I'm gonna put him on a pedestal and all that muck. Being asked intelligent questions is it's it's it's quite heartwarming because in an age where everybody wants to follow it's good when you get people who just want to watch for information they don't want to follow you to the ends of the earth they wouldn't jump off a bridge if you told them to they're just there for the knowledge that is so important i mean that's why i make so many educational videos on youtube you know some of you are probably thinking It looks nice but how much did it cost? Well, I never actually budgeted for this. It needed to be built so I just set about having it built. It was built by my father and his mate called Ali and really the only other people who had anything to do with the construction was the guy that put the vinyl flooring down, the plumber and the electrician. Everything structural was done by my father and his mate. And they did an absolutely awesome job, they're both in their 70s and their work ethic is a million times better than 90% of people half their age. Well I've got to massively thank them for the work that they've done here, it's, I mean it's absolutely awesome. So the cost, I took a ridiculous lowball guess and I said it'll cost about five grand or something to get the majority of it up. Well five grand didn't even pay for the wood, for the floor, roof and sides. Then we needed all the insulation, we needed the cladding, that's the plastic cladding, all around the inside. We needed the tongue and groove for the roof, we needed the flooring, we needed the benches, the lighting, the electrics, the plumbing, the veranda and also the felt shingles, that was expensive, the guttering. you know it all added up so consequently it took a lot longer than i thought it would take because i kept running out of money and i didn't want to borrow money not sort of scrounge money for any of my projects so i saved up i did it the old-fashioned way saved up got work done ran out of money saved up again continued the work ran out of money saved up again so consequently it took It took quite a long time. It's absolutely been worth it and now I'm not paying off some horrendous loan because it's all paid for. And that stupid, naive, lowball estimate guess of five grand, hello Angus, probably turned into nearer 20 or even 25. But everything's finished off to a really high spec and it's been absolutely worth it. Now I think at a later date, what I'll do, I'll make a video just explaining about the journey that I took from setting up an aquatic shop to closing the aquatic shop, setting up an online business to developing that into a home-based business, not because it's like super interesting or unusual, but because there's a lot of pitfalls all the way along that journey that I don't want anybody else to fall into, including partnership, loans and debt. I think that'll be useful to a lot of viewers because there's a lot of people fed up with working for other people who would like to work from home. They don't know how to start. They don't know what gear they need. Indeed. Um... Anything's achievable, but you do need a plan. A few years ago, I was actually working online at a shop and landscaping. I had three jobs on the go at the same time because I needed to see which one was the strongest, which one would actually work, and then go with that. So look out for that if you're interested in any of those topics. Thanks very much for watching. If you've liked this video, please give it a thumbs up, share it wherever you want and I shall see you next time. Donald Trump, and today...