Category: builders

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Spring contentment and progress

I can’t remember how long I’ve nursed the fantasy of potting up plants in a warm greenhouse whilst sipping a mug of tea. Maybe listening to an audio book, or a podcast.

I’m such a party animal. I’m not ashamed to say that the quiet life is definitely for me.

Potting up

This morning I took my mug of tea out to the polycrub. I sat there in the warmth, perched at the camping table surrounded by the smell of damp compost and the sound of skylarks rising over the moors above us, and felt content. I even managed to pot up a few trays of young seedlings.

This was my first taste of pottering about in this sheltered space, growing things without being blasted by the south westerlies, and it was wonderful.

We’re slowly wheelbarrowing loads of woodchip from our tonne bag on the other side of the croft to make a weed surpressant covering over the cardboard. It’s about half way there, and whereas the old me would be stressing that I can’t complete it more quickly, the new me just accepts that it’s slow but that it will eventually get done.

There are several trays of young seedlings that will need potting up into my canvas grow bags over the next few weeks. It will happen.

The house is progressing well.

We have plasterboarded out some of the roof space walls upstairs now, so I have a much better idea of the bedroom dimensions now that the eaves have been boarded out.

A friend suggested a clever hack for extra storage in the often somewhat wasted space in the eaves. Most people put a cupboard door in the eaves, but it’s still a bit inaccessible.

Drawer units either side of the headboard space

We’ve bought a couple of drawer units and are building the eaves around them. Once finished, this will be plastered and painted white, leaving the two drawer units embedded flush in the walls. Easy to access, one on either side of the bed, and useful space.

I think it’s going to work well.

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The midnight plasterer

Our plasterer has arrived at last.

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.

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Frankenfold the Manifold

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.

I’m very proud.

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Plasterboard progress

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.

It’s coming.

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Fuelled by Tunnocks

Watching a film recently, cosied up in the caravan on a cold winters evening, I couldn’t help but notice that there were over 15 minutes of film credits at the end of the footage.

It got me thinking how complex things have become in life (as well as how every single person involved in the film in any capacity now gets a mention).

It also made me smile when I thought of what the credits reel would look like if our house build and croft regeneration were a film. I’m saving up most of the honourable mentions for my long suffering husband, but there is one outlier that I think also deserves a shout-out.

Tunnocks wafer biscuits.

There is a caramel wafer biscuit made in Glasgow, Scotland, a part of daily life here and every bit as Scottish as porridge, haggis and single malt. It’s just called Tunnocks locally.

Tunnocks is an institution. I always have a packet of them in to fuel the day with a strong cup of tea.

The plasterers shun the dark chocolate variety as too sophisticated for their tastes, and go for the milk chocolate ones with their tea and two sugars every time.

Husband likes the dark chocolate ones best.

I think he’d smile at being thought dangerously sophisticated…😊😘.

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Ducts!

They may not be big enough to crawl through, but what the MVHR ducts lack in girth they make up for in number…

It looks a bit like spaghetti-geddon at the moment, with the ducts going everywhere. These loose ends will be fed into a manifold over the appliance wall in the kitchen, hence the waving around in mid air look. Husband has assured me he has it all under control and I have, to be fair, seen much labelling and even checklist tables.

You can see from this photo how useful the posi joists are in accommodating pipes, ducts and wiring. The gaps between the steel sections are big enough to be woven between.

The plasterboards are also going up. It’s strange how much they change the dimensions you perceive in each room.

All in all, it’s feeling like a good start to the year. The rain and sleet showers come and go but watching them from the big windows at the front of the house whilst work continues within is always inspiring.

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The plasterers arriveth .. or not

The festive break is now truly over, the shortbread is finished and the cards are all taken down . I’ve left some twinkly lights up over one of the caravan windows because I feel that these dark days still need a bit of twinkle. It’s very cold here now, with icy days and occasional snow flurries over the hills.

Icy morning from the caravan

For the last few days husband has been sorting things out in the house in preparation for the plasterer.

Much iciness

The plasterer was supposed to start yesterday with the strapping, the wooden batons that are tied to the stud walls to support the plasterboard, but he is ill and rightly being cautious is delaying until he is recovered. Covid days, eh. One of our many new challenges.

Battens

The house is filled to the rafters with bales of rockwool insulation and pallets of plasterboard and insulation board ready to be fitted. When you see it piled up like this it looks as if there is far too much to ever fit onto the walls.

Filled to the rafters

I can’t wait for this next stage. Husband is ducting and wiring away in readiness for the MVHR and with him and the plasterers in the house at the same time it will feel like we’re about to take a leap forward in visible progress.

Building material waiting to be let in

Internal walls! It doesn’t take much to make me happy. Here’s to lots of progress in 2022.

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Cold, starry nights, and concrete

As we move through November we draw ever closer to the winter solstice and the darkest, longest night of the year. The constellations of Orion and the Plough are clear and bright in the dark night skies, and we start to sense the breath of winter across the croft.

Starry skies

It’s time for warming stews, winter berries, warm spices and the comfort of thick socks and jumpers in the caravan. The fire is on most of the time now.

And time for concrete. After months of let downs, delays, finding new solutions and a new supplier, we at last have a firm date for the arrival of the liquid thermal screed to go over our underfloor heating pipes in the house to make our floor.

Pouring thermal screed

It’s coming next week. It’s taken us a whole year to get to this stage and this is a big milestone for us. Once the floor is hard and dry enough to walk on, some weeks down the line, husband will start the MVHR duct installation and electrical wiring in preparation for plasterboard installation early in the new year.

I try not to wish my life away by focussing upon this time next year when we will be dry and cosy in the house. I’m conscious that although it’s what I want, that every day is precious, and that it’s still a long journey to get to that point.

We may be in a cold and drafty caravan which causes a sharp intake of breath before getting dressed in the mornings (with as many layers as we can) or a leap into the shower squeaking at the exposure of skin to cold air before the hot water hits, but this way of life also has its blessings.

We are very aware of, and very close to nature and the elements. The night skies are remarkable at this time of the year. The storms are elemental. This year has been one of reconnection with the land and weather after many years of numbness caused by urban living, and it’s been remarkable.

Opening the caravan door and listening to the rushing of the burn over the croft on a crisp, starry night, perhaps with the occasional hoot of an owl is a wonderful experience. There are no other sounds. The silence is profound.

When the storms hit and we are tucked up under warm quilts or blankets listening to the wind tearing across the croft, or the rain lashing the windows, it does also instill a very real sense of well-being and cosiness. We are grateful that we’re not out there in the teeth of the storm like so many have to be, and very aware of its power.

We count ourselves as very blessed.

Life is good.

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We have underfloor heating pipes…

Things are progressing slowly but steadily now. We now have a flooring membrane throughout the house laid over the insulation sheets and edged with foam strip to allow for the screed expansion.

Exciting times, although the smell of the plastic was overwhelming for a bit!

We had originally thought to use a grid to lay the pipes onto, but as we’re tight for depth to the window base, husband decided to lay them free-form to save a few millimetres extra for the screed.

The cryptic markings which appeared mysteriously overnight apparently direct the traffic for the underfloor pipe layout.

These will be laid throughout the ground floor with the exception of the small room that we plan to use as a pantry, which we want to keep as cool as possible.

With a bit of luck we should be ready for the screed in the next few weeks.

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Flying insulation

A friend commented that there had been precious little recently in the way of house build updates. Which is very true. Progress has been slow, and we are still taping and foiling some months into the process.

A number of things have conspired to make what should have been a relatively quick job a complete marathon.

Husband has had to fill and tape all wall, door and window seams throughout the house BEFORE foiling, as well as taping everything again AFTER foiling.

This has turned into a huge, time-consuming undertaking which he felt was necessary because of gaps left by the builders. Gaps that if left open would have compromised our structural water and air tightness.

His faith in the quality of the work by the builders has been severely dented as these are not cosmetic problems that we felt could be covered over, sure to cause us issues some years down the line.

He has been doing this work alone, and other time-critical work has taken weeks away from this process, such as installing the house guttering and the start of work on the croft as Spring approached.

However, the end is in sight. The floor insulation for the next stage has arrived.

It arrived on a thankfully dry day, but a windy one. About 50 huge sheets of insulation which blocked the drive on arrival and which we had to manually carry between us into the house.

These sheets are big, requiring two of us to manoeuvre, but very light in weight, only 10kg each. They exhibited impressive aerodynamic properties as the wind caught them, acting like a sail, taking both our body weights to counter their desire to take off down the croft.

It took a whole afternoon to get them wrestled safely under cover into the house.

They’ve also provided me at least with a bit of a morale boost. They are a nod to the promise of progressing onto the next stage, which is laying these, then the underoor heating pipes, then screed, and us being a few steps closer to this being a house.

We will get there. Courage, mon brave!