Life, self-build and much mud on the Isle of Skye
The removals van arrives this afternoon and we should complete loading tomorrow. Once it’s gone, we’ll lock up the house, say goodbye to London and start the grand trek north to the island.
The island house is now fully wind and water tight, with electricity and water connections in place. It’s ready for us to take over the next phase building out the services and internal works.
There will be a bit of radio silence now until we arrive, but when I post next it will be from our croft.
At last.
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.
… Where would ye be?
(in the immortal words of The Big Yin, Billy Connolly).
I’ve just stocked up with a new pair of wellies. Wellies are the things that everyone on the island wears just about constantly, so a spare pair isn’t a bad idea.
As I have wide calves (read fat legs) I find that normal wellies are too tight for comfort, or that I simply can’t get them on at all.
I can’t tell you the money that I’ve wasted in the past in the interests of keeping my feet dry only to find that the boots only come so far up my legs before turning into rubber tourniquets. I quite like my blood supply, thank you.
I’ve found a company that sells wide leg wellies with little adjusting buckles so that you can fiddle until you’re comfy.
They arrived this morning, well packaged and in a funky drawstring mud bag for transportation. I’m impressed!
Thank you Jileon.com. You’ve made this fat-legged crofters wifie very happy today 😀👍.
Whilst sorting through the cupboards to pack we came across some Turkish kilim fabric covers that I had bought some time ago for very little money and had stashed away with the linens.
After I’d bought them, I’d discovered that they were all odd sizes, each one cut from an upcycled piece of old kilim. Because I had no cushion pads to fit them I’d clearly put them away to sort another day. But looking at them again today I thought they’d do very well for the static.
A number of them showed signs of mending, and all of them were old, vegetable dyed weavings. I’m very drawn to textiles, and especially to those with some age and history to them.
I didn’t want to buy more cushion pads. So I repurposed an old, single duvet that we were about to ditch and made three cushion pads from it to fit the covers.
I love their slightly faded, soft colours, imperfect patterns and visible mendings. You can feel the hands of the past on them and I can’t help wondering about their journey and who has repaired them in previous generations. It feels good to give both them and the old quilt a second life.
The rest of the linen cupboard has also been sorted and the old sheets and pillowcases that are way past their best will be used as decorating sheets or cut up as cleaning cloths and dusters this weekend, ready to be pressed into service in cleaning and painting the static in a few weeks time.
When did we give up repairing linens and buying new whenever we felt like it?
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..
Now that the exterior of the house is mainly complete, the builders will be finishing on site and handing over to us to make a start on the interior.
We had originally planned for the builders to do everything, but cost estimates quickly became prohibitive once they’d been discussed and confirmed. The build costs rose over 30% above the architects calculation estimates, leaving us with no alternative but to complete the house ourselves. We’d allocated some contingency, but the magnitude of this was beyond what we could absorb.
We are moving up and into the static in a few weeks time so that we can work full time on the build. As two IT people rather than builders, this is going to be a challenge!
The first week will be busy connecting water and power to the caravan and hooking up the gas bottles for heat and cooking so that we’ve got the basics in place. We also need to build steps for easier access, replace some of the flooring, fit a new boiler and give it a quick lick of paint. This will be our home for the forseeable few months and we need it to be warm, dry and comfortable. Only then can we make a start on the house itself.
Then we start with the foil membrane on the inside of the walls for heat retention and moisture control. There is already protective waterproof membrane on the outer walls underneath the cladding, but to ensure that the house is as sealed as possible we need to wrap the inside of the walls too before plasterboarding.
After that, the underfloor heating, screed and MVHR ducting. There’s something that gives me infantile pleasure as part of the generation that grew up with Alien to have ducting in the house… 🙂.
It’s certainly going to be different to our current lives, and I’m just so damned grateful that husband is a practical man who doesn’t seem daunted by what seems to me to be a whole mountain of challenges…
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… 👍☺️
The saying goes that the darkness is deepest just before the dawn.
As I sit here in our bedroom in the half light of morning listening to the birds on the nearby lake beating their wings against the water and the sounds of London slowly waking up, I understand that feeling.
We have this amazing dream that after two years of nurture, focus and hard work is now within inches of becoming reality. We are within just a few weeks of packing up our old house, getting in the car and driving with the dog to our new life on the island.We are weighed down with lists and arrangements, with disposing of things, and with decisions.
Although I have now finished work, husband still has three weeks to go and so doesn’t have the luxury of daily headspace to process things. I’m limited by what I can do to help. It’s a huge weight.
Covid 19 is on the rise again with the prospect of further lockdowns and travel restrictions which is adding another spoonful of stress and uncertainty to an already pretty potent mix.
I know that this will pass. I know that everything will get done, and that if it doesn’t get done the world won’t stop turning.I know this. We both know this.
We will find the space to hang on to the excitement of these new beginnings. Even when these feelings of excitement are heavily entwined with the decoupling from our old lives and all that this entails. Even when sleep is dominated with dreams of all the things we haven’t yet done. Even when our bedtime reading is all plumbing manuals and spreadsheets.
It’s important not to allow the “to-do” list to consume every waking moment and to reconnect with feelings of joy at what we are about to do.
Because of course it will all be worth it.New beginnings, a new way of life.The dawn is lightening the sky already.
We will be ready.
We’re preparing the static for the end of October as best we can whilst still being several hundred miles away.
We’ve been warned that there are often ninety mph winds that blow in the winter, and that the weight of the caravan alone won’t be enough for safety.
We hope that the combination of these tethered weights, an emplacement of strategically placed sandbags to funnel the prevailing south westerlies, and the protection afforded by the house will be enough to protect it from the worst of the winter gales.
We also need to level and secure the static more effectively, and for this we are going to use railway sleepers which we will have delivered to site over the next couple of weeks. We’ll use them to construct steps up to the caravan door as well so that our lovely but ancient spaniel (and equally ancient and rickety croft wifie) can make it in and out more easily 😊.
I’m slowly decompressing from work life.
I feel a bit like a balloon that was filled to capacity and at maximum tension. I bobbed along but was always conscious that everything was taut and there wasn’t much stretch left.
Not much capacity for squeezing in the good stuff, like realising dreams.
In the last week since finishing work I’ve been sleeping a lot. It feels as if someone has undone the knot at the neck of the balloon and is letting the air escape very slowly. I’m feeling as if there’s a bit of room now, with the balloon deflating a little more with each day that passes.
That’s a good thing. It’s freeing up some mental capacity for the lists that we’re building of things that have to be done before the move. Things that will help us realise the dream. Financial planning, changes of address, tools to buy for the build, sequencing the build plans, packing, clearing out things we no longer need. The list is a long one and continually being added to.
Those that know me will smile when they hear that the first thing I’ve bought for the static to keep us on track with the build tasks is a whiteboard…
I can see it now. Cold, frosty morning starts, piled-on old jumpers and big socks, mugs of coffee and bowls of porridge, and a morning stand-up to go through the priority tasks of each day.
Maybe retirement isn’t going to be that different to corporate life after all. Except so much more fun. Agile team leads, eat your heart out 😊
Ravencroft Skye 