He’s a wonderful guy, imbued with a quiet energy and zen-like focus with long grey hair and beard. I didn’t notice if he was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
He’s been here just three days and we already have four of the downstairs rooms taped, edges reinforced, sealed and the first coat of plaster applied.
Rather than travelling daily, he’s camping overnight in the house whilst he works. As far as I can tell from the depths of my cosy bed in the caravan he seems to be up and working by 6am, and as I write this at 10pm I can hear him still working away under the building lights in the house.
Our midnight plasterer is working like a Trojan. His plastering looks to be excellent. Even the basecoat that I looked at yesterday was as smooth as the icing on a wedding cake.
The rooms are slowly taking shape. It’s fascinating to watch the structure of the house gradually swallow up the kilometres of insulation, cable and ducting under a smooth skin of plaster.
When I see internal walls start to go up, albeit without plaster, I dare to imagine that the end is in sight. It’s definitely starting to look more like a house.
We continue to move slowly towards completion with plaster boarding, wiring and ducting all now happening simultaneously.
Husband has been fitting the ducting to take the mechanical ventilation pipes (the MVHR system) around the house. These pipes all come together in an interim pit stop over the appliance wall in the kitchen before snaking their way across to the plant room to be connected to their master.
To say that our architects were optimists and highly impractical would be an understatement. Watching husband try to adapt the manifold to fit the pipes into the area allocated to it on the plans was painful.
Speaking to other Hebhome builders it seems that others give up or don’t even try, and instead site the manifold in a cupboard upstairs, but husband was not easily deterred, and some days later Frankenfold was born…
A child born of ingenuity and galvanised steel drainpipe to cap off the unused bits, the manifold was adapted to fit the space. Not pretty, but perfectly functional. Our very own Frankenstein creation.
It’s now all in position and connected, looking purposeful.
In a short burst of mild, sunny weather this morning I rammed on my wellies and headed out on to the croft. It’s well overdue time to prepare the raised beds for the seasons growing, and I’ve been waiting for a break in the storms for weeks.
The deer have been terrible this winter. They’ve eaten everything that was left in the beds, which I stupidly didn’t net for protection. Actually, the nets wouldn’t have survived the storms anyway.
Roll on next year when we will have time to deer fence the croft. I think it’s the only way.
These are the remains of a couple of my perennial Taunton Deane kale plants. There’s basically nothing left of them, and I think that the damage is so severe that they won’t re-grow. The deer have even eaten rhubarb, spiky artichoke leaves and garlic, all things that they’re not supposed to like! It’s soul destroying after such a productive year of cropping from them.
However, despite the deer damage there are tentative, wonderful signs of spring.
The mint has started to re-grow.
The berry cuttings are starting to break into bud.
We have the first signs of rhubarb leaves pushing up through the soil like wrinkled red aliens.
I managed to weed a couple of the raised beds and get some red onion sets in before my back started to complain and I decided to beat a tactical retreat. I must remember to take it slowly at the beginning of the season, otherwise I’ll seize up after a whole winter of inactivity. And cake.
Gardening is a marathon, not a sprint. but it felt so good to be out there again.
Rain is lashing down in torrents from a leaden grey sky as I write. There’s ice in it too, and a stiff north westerly wind to drive it home.
From the caravan
The badly fitting, single glazed windows of the caravan don’t seem to provide much protection against this weather as I peer out into the gloom. I’m well wrapped up with three layers, including thermals, and I’m still chilly.
We’ve had an incredible run of storms so far this year, one right upon the coat tails of the previous one. Storms Corrie, Dudley, Eunice and Franklin have rolled over the island in the last six weeks in rapid succession, bringing 80 mph winds, hail and snow with little respite in between.
We’ve had very disturbed sleep this past month as the worst of the winds seem to come after dark. When they start, the caravan rocks and shudders as if it’s alive, straining against the lorry straps that lash it down like a wounded animal.
The noise of the hailstorms is deafening. It’s impossible to sleep through. It’s as if someone is emptying buckets of marbles into a tin bath on your head. Even burrowing further under the warmth of the duvet doesn’t dull the noise.
Image Francis Yeats
I bake. I make bread and cakes to warm and sustain us. I make soups and stews and sweet, eggy puddings and crumbles.
Brioche buns. Just because.
I venture out in the small, quiet pockets of calm between the storms and wonder at the crofts capacity to hold water. Everything is sodden, soaked.
I wear many layers. Recently I’ve taken to wearing my fingerless gloves in the caravan during the day to keep my hands warm. Tea has become an important, warming ritual in the afternoons, hands wrapped around the comforting heat of the mug.
In a world where there are a million variations on every theme, buying fittings for a house from scratch is not the fun job that you might imagine. It’s an endlessly exhausting task.
For those of you that have followed this journey from the beginning, you’ll know that we’re running a few years behind the original build schedule. Many of the design decisions and selections that we made in 2019 are either no longer available, now too expensive, or our thoughts have changed.
Things viewed in London don’t look the same here in the cool northern light of Skye.
I’ve been struggling with the kitchen design of our new build for years. The kitchen is the most important room in the house for me, cooking as much as I do. Part of the challenge I suspect is that these days every kitchen has an island. Ours doesn’t. So the photos that I see daily of kitchen designs and finishes just don’t look anything like the space we’ve got.
The second challenge that I have is that I don’t like “shiny”. Shiny, or gloss kitchens, can be wonderful in the right setting, but I’ve always preferred matt, natural, textured surfaces. It’s just the way I am. These types of kitchen have gradually started to come more into vogue in the last eighteen months, so it’s not as difficult as it once was to find selections, but every kitchen professional that I’ve spoken to has started from this point, and I simply get exhausted explaining preferences and correcting assumptions over and over again.
The third challenge is that I want a work surface that is as bulletproof and as maintenance-free as I can get it. I cook a lot and I know that at some point I’m going to cut on these surfaces, splash something on them that will stain, or put a red-hot pan down as I rush to run a burnt hand under a tap. What can I say, I’m a messy cook.
All of these things are possible to protect against in some of the modern materials available today, like Silestone or Dekton, but they come with a steep price tag.
The last challenge is that no matter what your budget, large or small, in this Inflationary, Brexit, Pandemic Britain, costs have gone through the roof in the last eighteen months. Which means in very real terms what you want now becomes increasingly expensive. Compromises become the norm.
Choices are, however, slowly being made. The poor Postie hefts box after box of flooring and tile samples over the caravan threshold with a pitying smile.
I vacillate between tasteful, subtle Scandi grey/blue/moss colours and a need for bright, warm tones. I’ll end up with a weirdly eclectic mix, I’m sure of it. Which is absolutely fine. This is home.
Husband is keen to have good, strong kitchen carcasses. I’m keen to have good worktops, plain slab cabinet doors painted in a matt finish, and well designed lighting.
I’m already thinking of my rapidly approaching dotage with dimming eyesight and shaky grip.
February is well into its stride, and despite relatively mild temperatures, the storms just keep coming. We’ve got gale warnings again for next week, and most evenings the caravan is rocking away like a bucking bronco here on the side of our windswept croft.
We’ve learned never to overfill mugs of tea and to hold onto things as we move from room to room. Craziness!
Using my lovely Christmas gifted Borja Moronto jugs for soy sauce
So what’s a girl to do whilst the weather is stopping her getting out on the croft? She makes sushi. Of course she does.
Sushi rolls awaiting slicing
I haven’t made sushi at home for many years. We used to eat it a lot in London where Japanese food outlets were good and readily available.
Not feeling confident that I could get sushi grade fresh fish I decided to err on the side of caution and use cooked or smoked fish instead of raw. In this case tuna mayo, smoked salmon, cooked prawns and smoked mackerel, all from my normal supermarket shop. I managed to get wasabi, nori and even cooked crispy onions for coating some of the rolls.
Crispy onions – I could eat these by the spoonful
The biggest challenge in the tiny caravan kitchen was making room to assemble the rolls. It took a bit of shuffling and manoeuvring, and was a much fiddlier process than in a spacious kitchen with lots of worktop space.
I won’t go into detail here, but let’s just say that any flat surface was fair game (toaster, I thank you) and that it was inelegant in the extreme.
But amazingly they worked. And they tasted great.
Next time I may try making vegetarian sushi. I could imagine that using roasted butternut squash, avocado, cucumber, sweet potato and peppers would work just as well as these fish based fillings.
Never let fear of failure or lack of space stop you trying something new. You can usually always find a way.
The days are definitely lengthening now , perceptibly so. Spring should be on its way, although no one seems to have told the weather gods that. It’s still hail, snow and gales most days.
I did a quick rustle about in the raised beds this week and although I should be clearing and planting soon, it’s still far too cold and wet. The garlic has popped it’s head up a little, but that’s it.
I’ve ordered the polycrub. We did apply for a crofters grant to help with the cost, but we were unsuccessful. They wanted a five year business plan showing anticipated horticultural sales and letters of guarantee from local outlets that they would take our produce.
This isn’t the way that we’ve planned to do things. We will sell produce at the croft gate if we have any surplus, but we are mainly growing for ourselves and our neighbours, not as a fully commercial enterprise. As such we don’t qualify. We’re disappointed, of course, but we’ve bitten the bullet and gone ahead with buying the polycrub anyway.
Polycrub loveliness
It’s six metres by four of rigid polycarbonate sheeting, fish-farm tube loveliness. After the last few months of storms I’m doubly convinced that this is the only thing that would survive the winds on this exposed hillside.
Seed porn
It will revolutionise what we can grow, though. Tomatoes, chillies, squash, cherries, basil… lots of tender plants that wouldn’t thrive in our cold, windswept raised beds. We hope to have it installed in April, just in time to move crops in there for the summer.
Very exciting!
Now to clear out the caravan spare room out from a whole year of being a junk room, and set it back up to start seedling production again. It will be good to see the blue grow lights illuminating the hillside once more.. 😊
Sometimes, when you’ve lived through two successive storms and the wind is getting up for a third wave, there is a need for Emergency Cake.
Today was such a day. As the wind roared around the walls of the caravan and the rain lashed at the windows, I looked outside and declared the weather so foul that it qualified as an Emergency Cake Day.
The key was not to go out to get any ingredients. Far too horrid out there. I would have been swept into a ditch in an instant. Not a good way to go.
So it was rather lucky that I just happened to have a jar of cherry jam and a small punnet of fresh cherries in the fridge, and some cream. I have no idea how that happened. The Seventies were calling me.
As regular readers will know, the oven in the caravan is tiny. One cake in my one square baking tin fills the whole cooking space. It’s a testament to how badly I wanted this that I was prepared to prepare and bake the cake twice (in the same tin) and sandwich them together stickily and unctuously with jam, kirsch, fresh cherries and cream.
And so, dear reader, two hours later both layers were baked. The filling was spread onto the base layer. The top layer was manoeuvred into place. There was much chocolate grating to hide the fissures.
No fancy piping gear here, I’m afraid. This is the Seventies at its most fabulously rustic in cake form.
Black Forest gateaux
Any locals fancying a slice had better battle their way to the top of our rain-lashed hill before it all disappears. A pot of tea and an inelegant, squidgy slice of lusciousness awaits.
Whilst storm Malik rages, whipping the tarpaulined piles of material stored at the front of the house into a frenzy, progress inside the house continues slowly.
The wind was huge last night. It was apparently gusting to about eighty miles per hour, and it was so loud that it was almost impossible to sleep. The caravan was dancing in the wind, walls flexing and straining hard against the webbing straps that hold it down.
Piles of building material on a calmer day
Morning brought a damage assessment between the storm flurries. Nothing too serious thankfully – a few pipes blown out of place, the bin and bits of wood and building material blown across the croft, and the cover on the rotary clothes dryer totally disappeared . I suspect it’s flown all the way to Norway by now.
We have a few more days of this predicted so we will be battening down the hatches and riding it out as best we can.
On the house front, we have an almost plasterboarded corridor and hall now. Progress.
Corridor
It makes such a difference to see walls inside rather than just spaces. I’ve been struggling with the kitchen design and colours, unable to tell how much light the room will have, but over the next few weeks I should be in a position to see exactly what it will look like. Then I will need to get my skates on and get finalising selections..
It’s true that these days we almost have too much choice. Although having said that, I can never find quite what I have in my minds eye. I seem to have a remarkable ability to love what is not trending at the moment, making it difficult to source. I will slap myself into decisions soon.
Kitchen still awaiting plasterboard and the light well
The two Dereks are plasterboarding for all they’re worth, and we are starting to have rooms emerge from the chaos.
The boot room
Husband has been working long hours to keep pace with the wiring and plumbing. The house is full of strange ducts and metalwork, like something from an industrial post-apocalyptic novel. It’s all slowly taking shape.
It’s strange how a bit of plasterboard changes the aspect of rooms. When we had open studs for walls and you could see through them to the next room, it was difficult to get a real sense of the solidity and space. Now the rooms have opaque, solid boundaries, giving them a feeling of volume. Makes it much easier to visualise fittings and furniture.
The plant room
As I write I’m sitting in the caravan in a burst of unexpected sunshine. It’s streaming through the windows infusing a bunch of gifted, slightly overblown tulips with an warm orange glow.
Spring is coming. Each morning it’s lighter a little earlier.
Ravencroft Skye 