Category: boxes

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Meanderings

It’s raining as I write. A grey, incessant rain that takes hold and makes you feel glad that you’re not out in it. The house is enveloped in water.

I’m having a low, quiet day. I get them every now and then – no energy to do anything and a feeling of wanting to hide from the world. These days come, and they go. I feel increasingly anxious about being out there, with people. Is it an age thing, I wonder?

I baked another sourdough boule this morning. I’m slowly getting back into it and the newly developed starter (Feisty Fran II) is now maturing nicely. She’s a home-bred local girl from natural Skye yeasts, so is well used to our weather.

Feisty Fran our Skye rye sourdough starter

A few loaves a week will soon get me back into the swing of things. I’m trying an 85% hydration recipe with rye that tastes great but spreads like a big-bottomed girl and doesn’t give me the crusty “ear” that I like, so I need to work on that.

Earless wonder

It’s a very loose dough so needs better tension to hold the slash and to be able to create an “ear”. It’ll get there. I’ll eventually work it out. Bread-making is just alchemy.

“Earless” sourdough

Husband has done a great job with the hedging around the deer-fenced orchard and vegetable area of the croft, which is all now in, and mulched. Some of the seedlings and twigs are in bud already so I’m hoping that’s a good sign.

Husband has now returned to indoor jobs, building shelves and working on our big bookcase in the sitting room area.

Our carpenter Ben had to leave unexpectedly and didn’t get time to install the big bookcases as planned so husband has been left to finish them. It’s been weeks of cutting, osmo oiling and assembly. It’s coming together now at last. I know it’s all been meticulously measured but I had a bit of a panic attack when I saw it, thinking that it wouldn’t fit on the wall under that roofline. Husband assures me that we have 2cm of clearance..

We can’t wait to get the book boxes unpacked.

There are four of these to go on that base

The seedlings are coming along well and I’ve moved the hardier of them, the lettuce, beans and kale, out into the polycrub. The cucumbers, tomatoes, aubergines and more heat-loving tender plants remain indoors for now, the green wall of food lined up against the big south-facing windows.

Cucumber babies doing their thing

Whilst I was in the polycrub the other day clearing old grow tubs, I found a surprise stash of carrots! All good, perfectly firm and sweet. These are a batch of St. Valery carrots, a heritage variety sowed last year from Real Seeds that I’d forgotten. We’ve been snacking on them raw with homemade humous and olives and I’ve been so impressed with the taste that I’ve bought more seeds for sowing this year.

Nature is just amazing. We’ve managed to eat kale, purple sprouting broccoli, tatsoi and carrots throughout the hungry gap.

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Living more simply

As each box slowly gets unpacked I feel more weighed down by the stuff that we’ve accumulated over our lifetimes.

To be fair, it’s the accumulation of two lives and two households that couldn’t be sifted and streamlined before we left London because we were in lockdown, with no tips or charity shops taking anything.

And it’s also the result of lives lived fully, of travel, and children, and passions. Things just attach themselves to you as you move through these life experiences.

But oh lord, so much stuff. It feels quite overwhelming, and we’ve only just started.

Sensible me says just sort a box at a time. Keep, throw or donate. Do it gradually and you’ll get there. Don’t panic.

Overwhelmed me says why oh why do we have four thousand sheets all in different and unspecified sizes? I know that they’d come in useful as dust sheets for the studio or several other uses, but I am determined not to cram this house to the rafters. Determined.

We will streamline. We will simplify. We do not need all of this stuff. Someone would welcome it, I’m sure.

Deep breaths. I can see several trips to the local charity shops and a massive shed sale on the horizon very soon..

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Settling into January

The winter gales are well underway now here on Skye, howling around the house and singing in the woodburner flue. The good thing is that the house feels solid and warm, despite being perched on the cusp of this very exposed hill overlooking the sea.

A break in the storms

I still haven’t got used to the lack of rocking motion that we used to have in the caravan whenever the wind blew! I’m sure I developed sea legs in the two years that we lived in it.

Woodburner doing its thing

We’ve decided not to unpack any further boxes until we’ve finished the electrics in the house and got some storage built. At the moment we have no lights or live power in about half the house and no bookcases, wardrobes or shelves. Just the essentials. As most of what we will bring in from the boxes will have nowhere to be put away it makes sense to hold off for a while.

Husband is continuing with the fitting of lights and sockets. Once he’s finished that, a good few more weeks work, I’d say, we can start building the shelving for the linen cupboard, server room and pantry. Then we can start unpacking a bit more.

We have just ordered the wood for the bookcases and wardrobes and have a joiner lined up to build them for us in February. That will be a big step forward in making the house a home. At the moment it’s still feeling a bit echoey and empty.

Sunrise this morning

But we’re loving waking up to the most incredible sunrises. The bedroom faces South East and often on even the most grey and dreich of Scottish winter days there’s a brief, glorious burst of early morning sunlight before the clouds swarm across the sky.

Borrowed friends croft dog living it up on the sofa in the sun

The sunlight in the house during the day is fabulous. The low winter sun fills the rooms. Once we have finished I think that this will be a wonderful space to live in. I can already see that we will need to agree on blinds soon..

My job this coming week is to osmo oil the oak interior doors. There are fourteen of them to do, and each door needs two coats, so that will keep me busy for a while. It’s good to be useful beyond feeding us both.

Kitchen in use, with cooks G&T to hand

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The last few weeks

Despite not having a joiner to finish the skirting boards, which are unceremoniously piled up in the living room, or the door linings and architraves, or a plasterer to finish the stairwell, we’re still making progress.

Chaos, building supplies, painted walls!

Good friends have helped with coats of paint in the bedroom, the upstairs bathroom, landing, dining room and kitchen. Andy is so much better at painting than I am, and so much more efficient, that a weeks work has resulted in a huge difference. It’s all starting to look dangerously white..

I’m hoping against hope that there will be enough rooms ready for us to move in over the next month. We’ve had surprisingly mild weather for the time of year, but it can’t last. We had snow on the hills at this point two years ago when we first moved here, so it may be delayed, but it’s surely coming.

Kitchen being painted

Husband has been fitting lights and sockets in the house and will move onto the bathrooms next. If we can get basic facilities up and running we can move in and enjoy the warmth. It’s already a comfortable and constant temperature compared to the caravan.

First wall light in

As we continue the build and start making plans for our first family Christmas for the last few years, I’m aware of how much we still have to do to finish it, but moving in feels very close now.

Whilst all this happens, life also goes on. The deer fencing for the vegetable and orchard area of the croft has arrived. I’m not quite sure when it will get installed, but it will at some point. We have a friends birthday coming up and I’ve baked her a pear, brandy and orange pie.

Because why not.

Pear pie

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Top barn

The barn build started this week. This is something we wish we’d had the time to do earlier in the process of setting up the croft, but at least it’s going up now!

It was chosen for its strength rather than its looks, as you’ll see from the photos here. Now that the panels are going on it looks like a huge sea container.

Perched atop the windiest part of this exposed hillside it needed to be strong enough to withstand our 90 mph gales without flinching. Two years living on the croft has taught us not to underestimate the winter storms when they come, as they do every year.

This barn is industrially rated for high winds and is constructed of insulated steel panels. As soon as the guys started to put it up it became clear that it was a substantial construction, which is a good thing, and exactly as planned, as the winds here would flatten a lesser building in the first storm.

Big bolts

It’ll serve multiple purposes. Part of it will be a workshop for husbands build and carpentry equipment, part storage of croft produce like potatoes and root vegetables, as well as storage of boxes and spare stuff from the house, and part equipment/car cover with a roll top door at one end.

I can’t help feeling that despite its enormous size that we’re going to fill it…

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Deciding what’s essential

Moving into this caravan has taught me again how privileged I am and how I had no real idea about the minimum level of basics needed to be comfortable.

As I unpack each box and the tiny kitchen fills up I hold my head in my hands and ask myself why I thought I really needed that item over and over again.

For example, I packed four wooden chopping boards. Four. What on earth did I think I was going to be preparing? There isn’t enough worktop space to lay them out for use let alone enough space to stack them.

I have one drawer in the caravan kitchen which I’ve filled with all our knives, cutlery and utensils. It’s over full. I seem to have thought that several wooden spoons were essential. The list goes on.

Now, of course I can get more creative with ways of storing things, I know. I’d bought some macrami hanging baskets which I’ve hung to hold apples, vegetables that don’t need refrigeration and other bits. They don’t hold much weight so it’s light things only.

I’ve got hooks up for mugs and hanging storage for other things to keep them off the work surface. Walls, however flimsy, I’ve discovered, are my friend.

But the key thing here is less stuff rather than more ways to cram extra in. I will pare this back over the coming weeks to what I really use so that it’s more comfortable.

We’ve discovered that the oven doesn’t work, so my old slow cooker has already proved its weight in gold whilst my ever resourceful husband gets time to work out what’s wrong. I made a lamb and vegetable stew with dumplings in it a few days ago, and a rice pudding. It’s so comforting after a cold day of hard work to come into a caravan warm and fragrant with the smell of dinner cooking.

We still have no water. The pipes in the caravan had been cut when they were removed previously for transportation which we didn’t notice until we came to install them.

This meant that new pipes and connectors had to be ordered, which won’t arrive until next week. So no running water or usable toilet… We are filling containers from the one tap in the house. I won’t go into the mechanics of the toilet arrangements for my more delicate readers, but it’s led to many moments of hilarity and a more intimate knowledge of the croft than we had been expecting..

A camping portaloo should arrive any day now… 😊

PS. we do have a comfortable bed that we managed to crowbar into the tiny bedroom. It’s my bliss at the moment.

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The final few yards

It’s less than a week now until we move, and we’re starting to flag a bit.

Every room is full of boxes, either full or waiting to be filled, lining the rooms like some cardboard termite mound whilst we squeeze through tunnels between them.

It’s tiring. Both the constant decision making process – to store, to the caravan, to the charity box, to trash – and the packing and manhandling of the boxes to safe stacks around the house.

There is nothing that brings home the stark reality of having too much stuff like the process of having to pack it away.

To be fair, the bulk of it is books. I honestly don’t know how many boxes of books we have. It must be in the hundreds.

Husband and I both share an abiding love of books, but combining our collections when we married three years ago has resulted in a veritable tsunami of books. Working in the book industry for major publishers over the last thirteen years has only fed the beast. It’s overwhelming. We’ve never had them all unpacked…

When we get to the island we’re going to have to do further weeding out and disposal. There simply won’t be enough wallspace to build enough book shelves to take them all, I’m sure of it.

However, we’re now on the final stretch. The last few yards.

The day of the move is almost upon us, She says with a big, tired smile.

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Apple and blackberry handpies

Before I put away all the baking stuff I had to make something sweet and seasonal to give us a bit of a lift through all this packing.

Apple and blackberry hand pies. They’re never going to win any beauty contests, but they tasted delicious.

Shortcrust pastry was enriched with egg, sugar and ground almonds to make it crumbly and crispy on the outside, almost like a biscuit. These were filled with lightly poached Coxes Orange Pippin apples and big, juicy blackberries.

We ate these over the last few days whenever we needed a lift. It helped.

Food can be medicine for the spirit, you know.

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Work boots and packing boxes

We ran out of bread yesterday afternoon, so husband offered to pop into the local Tescos to pick some up.

The last thing I was expecting was for him to come back with a bargain pair of steel-toe capped work boots for me.

He returned and presented me with them with a flourish worthy of a man clutching a large bunch of red roses. Who says romance is dead!

I guess this means that I am going to have to pull my weight on the build, then… 🤔

I secretly love them. I may never take them off.

These have been added to the rapidly growing pile of knee pads, work trousers and power tools that are filling every free space in the house at the moment. This is the reality of a household getting ready to move in just a few weeks time.

Bertie, our ancient but lovely spaniel, has been reduced to sleeping in odd corners wedged between the boxes wherever he can.

I can see that he is perplexed by the erosion of his space, with boxes forming cardboard labyrinths around the house.

Poor dog. At his age he deserves peace and quiet, and a degree of constancy, and all we give him is change..

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Of slow cooked stews and power tools


We’re now in the final few weeks of the London house as the October winds blow. We sit listening to the rain and wind blustering through the branches of the crab apple trees that flank the house, commenting ruefully to each other that this is an early trial for the Skye weather.

We’re making lists of what will be packed for storage and what will be needed in the caravan for the duration of the build.

I’m anticipating a cold, wet Highland winter in the caravan and days of hard physical work, something unfamiliar to our soft urban bodies. Not to mention my still recovering replacement bionic knees.

We’re going to ache and I’m sure that exhaustion will hit pretty quickly. Husband will bear the brunt of this as there are things that he can do that I simply can’t, so one of my small contributions will be keeping us fed. Food will be important for both fuelling tired muscles and keeping morale going.


I’m packing my slow cooker so that I can make soups and stews first thing in the morning to come into at the end of the day without too much effort. It’s comforting to come home to the warmth and smell of a lamb hotpot permeating the caravan when you’re tired, cold and wet. We should be able to raise a spoon and some chunks of bread if we have energy for nothing else!


The kitchen in the caravan is also pretty small so I’m trying to condense down what to pack to the most essential items only. Kettle, oven dishes, plates, cutlery, a few good knives etc. I suspect that our food will be basic until we are in the house, and eaten off laps, but that’s fine by us.


Forget the wild fantasies of feasting off venison and salmon in the Highlands – this is going to be lots of simple cooking designed to fill us up and keep us warm. Soups, porridge, stews and dumplings. Hearty fare, albeit with fresh local produce.

Whilst I’m looking at supplies, husband is restocking essential tools for the build. He got rid of a lot of tools when he moved from the North of England, thinking that they’d no longer be needed in London (and having no storage space for them).

Our living room here is gradually filling up with reciprocating saws, drill bits, power screwdrivers, steel capped boots and work trousers.

I hug myself in anticipation. Not long now until we pack up the car with our ancient spaniel and start the long, slow drive up to the island.

It’s all becoming very real… 👍☺️