About
Simon Culverhouse
A short introduction to the person behind My Project Corner and the path that led to building the site.
I'm Simon and, with my French wife Florence, I have been living in Brittany, France since the turn of the century.
We relocated after buying a run-down farmhouse with an acre of land in 1999. The plan was to renovate the property ourselves and produce as much of our own food as possible.
This website is where I share the projects, experiments, and practical solutions that came out of that way of life.
In the Projects section you will find builds created to solve real problems around the house, workshop, and garden. That includes things like a chicken plucker to make processing homegrown poultry faster and easier. I try to reuse reclaimed parts and low-cost materials wherever possible.
My Website
This is the third incarnation of my website. The first version was built with WordPress on cheap hosting, but it was painfully slow after I had invested many hours into it.
To avoid rebuilding everything from scratch, I changed hosting provider. I moved to WPMU DEV, which was expensive for me at the time, but the hosting and support were excellent and the site finally became usable.
After a few months the performance dropped again. That was mostly self-inflicted: I kept improving the site by piling on plugins and extra styling until it became overcomplicated and slow.
In June 2020 I made a complete change. My Project Corner became a static website built with Hugo and hosted on Google Firebase. It was a big learning curve, but the result was a much faster site and far more control over the layout.
The current version continues that same goal: keep the site simple, fast, and focused on useful projects.