The kittens have been exploring the new bathroom, generally getting into everything and underfoot as much as possible.
They’re fascinated by the bath tub.
They’ve been balancing on the rolltop edge, sliding down the slope at the back and swinging from the taps. It’s like a skateboard park in there for them, except for paws rather than wheels.
Here Fergus is eying those very tempting looking towels as his next potential piece of feline excitement.
Personally I’m just excited to have got the mirror that I bought two years ago up onto the wall at last. And that it fits the space for which it was intended!
In the race to get into the house before the highland winter really bit, we’re down to the wire now.
The weather over the last few days has been much colder as the winds have veered to the north east, and snow is forecast.
We are still at least a week away from moving in. Husband is trying to fit a toilet, sink and shower so that we have basic facilities in place, but it’s slow going. We have water to the upstairs bathroom now, we just need the fittings in place!
Mornings in the caravan are painful now. Temperatures drop to a few degrees centigrade overnight and even with the gas fire on full blast the caravan doesn’t reach more than sixteen degrees centigrade all day. I have dug out my fingerless gloves and thermals.
When it’s like this I retreat to the house and sit in the warmth of the bedroom whilst husband gets on with the plumbing. I can’t unpack anything whilst it’s still a building site, but I can sit and imagine. The solar gain from our big windows, combined with the underfloor heating are very efficient, and it’s warm!
Sunshiny day. But cold.
I dream of hot showers and drying off in a warm room without having to do the shivering dance to race into clothes before anything freezes.
Not long now.
I popped into the polycrub earlier this morning to see how things were faring. The temperature gauge recorded that it had dropped to 0.5C in there last night, but everything seems fine. The kale is looking perky, the slugs are having a bean feast with my pak choi, and the beetroot is looking pretty bulletproof.
I am still awed by the miracle of my winter lettuces.
We have snow on the tops at last. I always compare the weather at this time of the year with when we arrived on the island two years ago in the teeth of a storm, and both subsequent years have been warmer. I was beginning to wonder if we’d see any snow at all, but temperatures plummeted a few days ago and we now have a glorious white dusting on the high peaks.
Dusting of snow on the hills
The MVHR and the heating are operating well in the house. It’s already significantly warmer and more stable in temperature than the caravan.
As we shiver and dress in the damp cold of 5°C mornings I hold onto the fact that we’ll be in the house in a few weeks time. No more icy mornings playing the duvet game trying to dress without exposing any bare flesh to the elements.
After a wait of several weeks the wood for the sills arrived this afternoon, cheerfully delivered by our local sawmill guy. In the end he decided that the pews would be rather wasted if we were to refinish them for sills, and that he would prefer to preserve the original patina, so declined to sell them to us and found us suitable 4m lengths of local Douglas fir instead.
4m Douglas fir planks
I can’t say that I blame him, although I was quite taken by the idea of old wood having a second life in our new home. But at least that patina, burnished by the bottoms of the righteous as it was, will be protected.
Husband has been fitting sockets, switches and lights like a demon and will move onto one of the bathrooms next week. Once we are electrickified and have a working toilet and shower, we’re in!
The fact that the house is still stuffed to the rafters with building materials, tools, equipment, wood and boxes of everything that you can think of is another hurdle to get over. Once everything is connected up…
In the meantime I have tried a new recipe in my sloping caravan mini oven. This may be one of the very last cakes I bake in here, isn’t that such a strange thought. My new ovens await, sitting there, smugly level, shiny and pristine.
This is Nigel Slaters orange and poppy seed cake, sticky with a fresh orange and marmalade glaze which I hope won’t taste any less good for it’s signature 45° slope.
We decided to tile the entrance hall, boot room, utility room and bathrooms. All of these are wet areas and need a practical, hard wearing floor surface.
I initially favoured stone or slate as a floor material here, but after I discovered that regular sealing and maintenance would be required decided to take another route. Life is too short to be resealing floors regularly.
We’ve chosen porcelain stone-effect tiles. They’re non-slip, easy maintenance, strong and hard wearing. I’m promised that an occasional mop down is all that’s needed.
Not too dark as the bathrooms and entrance hall are north facing, and not too light so that I’m constantly washing the mud off them.
Bathroom floor
The only challenge was that we’d need to find a tiler to lay them. Husband didn’t feel that he could do a good job with grouting, although he’d be fine laying the tiles. On this island it would seem that finding a tiler is a practical impossibility, so we were pleased when an alternative solution presented itself to us. Thank you Universe 🙏
Luckily one of the plasterers we had working with us had a nephew in Glasgow who was a tiler and who was interested in coming up to do the work and bagging a few Munro’s in his spare time. (For you non mountaineers, this means climb a few challenging mountains whilst up here).
First tiles down in entrance hall
The other walls in the bathroom will be half clad in wood. It’s a softer finish than tiles and will provide a strong colour and texture contrast. We’re still finalising the finish – either a simple Osmo oil stain, or more radically a charred Shou Sugi Ban finish. Watch this space!
We’ve spent the last few days (and will no doubt spend the next few months!) painting the walls in the house.
They’re all white, which we decided to live with for a year in order to assess the light and decide which colours would work best for us.
After first living with silver walls with the foil, then terracotta walls with the plaster (which I personally loved, although it’s not designed to be left unpainted), white seems remarkably bright. We’ve both got snow blindness after painting it for two days.
Plaster walls in the entrance hallTrade white paint
The first coat, a mist coat, has just gone on in this picture. You can see that it’s a bit streaky and blotchy where the raw plaster has sucked up the thinned paint. It’s much better now that the second coat has gone on.
The first coat of white
For a slightly dark, north-facing entrance hall, with this picture taken on a grey and rainy day, the white really reflects what daylight there is and makes the most of it.
Interestingly, having brilliant white on the walls just reinforces that I love colour! I just need to get it right!
It’s increasingly starting to feel like a proper house now!
I feel as if we’re spinning lots of plates and at any time they’re going to come crashing down and make a proper mess of the floor.
Let’s hope not.
Whilst the plasterers continue strapping, boarding out and plastering upstairs, the plaster has now dried fully downstairs, and husband has started painting the first of the rooms.
Large tubs of paint
The walls are going to take three coats of paint, as the new plaster sucks up the pigment like a sponge. I suspect that we are going to be heartily sick of decorating by the time we’ve painted the whole house. Painted the whole house three times.. I’m not sure how well the plan to live with it for a year to get used to the light then redecorate with colour is going to hold! We may never feel like painting again 😊
I’m trying hard to focus on how much money that will save us and not the stiff backs, sore arms and paint splattered hair.
Whilst final ducting and plastering goes on upstairs we’re ordering the bulk of the things needed to finish the build now.
We always knew that the costs for flooring, kitchens and bathrooms would all come out at the same time, but it is a bit terrifying to watch thousands of pounds disappear like smoke from the bank account. The joys of self building, eh. And prices go up every time you look again at an item. Craziness, at the moment.
We’ve ordered the kitchen and utility room cupboard carcasses and are just about to do the same for the cabinet doors. The cabinet knobs all arrived last week. The external lights, spotlights and plug sockets are all here. The sinks, taps and bathroom fittings have all been ordered and will start dribbling in over the next few weeks. The floor and bathroom tiles should be here shortly.
Kitchen sink arrived!
We’ve still got doors, skirting, architraves and a staircase to order, but we’re getting there.
Plate spinning will continue for the next few months. I can’t say when, if ever, normal service will be resumed.
Our lives seem to consist of plastering and ordering at the moment.
The downstairs of the house is all nearly plastered now. Just a cupboard and the light well to finish, then we move upstairs to do the bedrooms. It’s drying well.
Drying plaster on the big walls
We’re really pleased with the quality of the finish. I’m glad now that we didn’t go with tape and fill. I secretly like the colour of the raw plaster, which reminds me of the sun-warmed walls of dusty Tuscan cottages. It smells like damp mushrooms as it dries, though.. not quite so romantic 😊
I’ve made a half hearted bid to keep it as it is, except I know it wouldn’t stay looking like this. Husband and Cornish Jeff have counselled me against this, sensibly, I know.
Painted it shall be.
Dining room end
I strongly suspect that it’s looking so attractive to me at the moment because the alternative, which is many, many weeks with a paint roller, is next on the cards. The paint and rollers have arrived. It’s going to be a long job.
Linen cupboard
Back to the ordering. We’re working on bathroom fittings at the moment.
Who knew that there were so many variations on a tap? Who knew that everything was going to skyrocket in price as it has? What a time to build 🙈…
One of the challenges with the design of our house is that the kitchen was quite small and potentially a little dark.
All of the Hebhome designs for longhouses have kitchens that are small and minimalist. This was one of the bigger ones!
We figured with the addition of the utility room and the pantry, however, that we would be absolutely fine. We’ve just carved up the functional areas differently.
Big, seldom used appliances like a dehydrator or bulky, noisy appliances like the washing machine and tumble dryer go into the utility room, and dried or canned goods storage that I’d normally have in the kitchen go into the pantry.
The kitchen space also faces an internal wall without light, except the light that the large, double floor length windows in the dining area provide.
To counter this we asked the architect if we could install a roof window that would channel light through the sloping walls of the bedroom above down to the kitchen ceiling. It would be plastered to close the walls off from above and would be hidden in the roof slope of the upper bedroom.
Up until now during the build this has just been a square mark on the bedroom floor and a slightly odd pattern in the ceiling joists. But yesterday the plasterers cut through the bedroom floor, opening up the light well into the kitchen.
I was holding out on final kitchen finishes and colours until this happened so that I could establish what worked best in situ. The amount of light in that space makes a massive difference to the colours I’d been looking at.
So, ever onwards and upwards! We’re ordering flooring wood, tiles and kitchen units next.
I have been circling around kitchen choices like a lost soul for many months now. For me, the kitchen is the most important room in the house, and I’ve been agonising about getting it right.
I’ve gone through the “definitely going handleless and sleekly modern” to “definitely preferring a painted cabinet finish with handles” stage. Several times.
I could quote you catalogue page numbers from all the major manufacturers with my eyes closed. I can tell the difference between grey stone and slate grey finishes in a heartbeat. Not for me the indecision about integrated J handles and true handleless doors. Oh no. No longer.
I think I’m there now, though. A final, tortured decision has been torn from my befuddled brain.
In the end it all came down to knobs.
All the sleek, handleless kitchens had a bit of a smooth, laminated finish that I decided wasn’t for me. I also thought about how I cook, with pastry covered hands and sticky fingers. I’m tactile.
Handleless kitchens look super streamlined, and would probably be more in keeping with the open plan style of the house, but I’ve thought long and hard about the way I use my kitchen and I’ve decided that for me at least, handles are more practical as a choice. And that I just prefer a matt, textured finish on my cabinet doors (less sticky fingerprints, I’m convincing myself).
Knobs! They can look good 😊
We’ve decided to splash out on a heatproof, scratch-proof worktop in the form of Dekton, a stone-based product that is super strong. I can chop and wave my hot pans and oven dishes about with gay abandon.
We’re going with painted cabinet doors, with either cast iron or steel door knobs. The ones I’m quite taken with at the moment are actually based on an ancient Georgian design and are forged steel with a beeswax finish. I may still look at other finishes that may be easier to keep clean, but I love the way these feel in your hand. Very solid, comfortable and tactile.
I don’t think that it matters that this is a contemporary house with modern, slab door fronts but old style cabinet knobs. Does it? They add character and I like them, and that’s the most important thing. I’m hoping that if they’ve been around for hundreds of years already that they’re not suddenly going to go out of fashion tomorrow. I will not be swayed by all the shiny bar handles in the beautiful peoples houses one bit.
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.
Ravencroft Skye 