Category: plastering

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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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Plastering progress

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 🙈…

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Let there be light

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.

It’s coming.

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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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Plastering, wiring, ducting & kebabs

Now is a really busy time for the build. We have two guys (the two Dereks) busily and speedily installing battens and erecting plasterboard panels, with husband wiring and ducting alongside them.

It means long days and not much in the way of breaks. He’s shattered when he collapses in front of the fire each evening. A good tiredness, I think – one born of a long days manual labour and visible progress, but certainly tiredness. We’re neither of us as young as we were!

The best I can do is provide tea and food as it’s needed, and finalise the many remaining decisions on bathroom and kitchen finishes from the caravan.

When I’m not browsing tile sites and bathroom fittings catalogues, or calling Home Energy Scotland for advice, I spend much of each day making flatbreads, cake, quiches, stews and soups.

My latest attempt at urban food is kebabs! Sliced leftover roast lamb, shredded red cabbage, garlic and mint yoghurt, harissa paste and baked soft flatbreads. When you don’t have a takeaway on the island, you make them yourself. Probably much healthier too.

I’m not even pretending that the pear frangipane tart was anything other than an indulgence…we need yummy things right now.

I’m also reading this. An excellent book, if slightly terrifying. It’s about the disappearance of insects due to pollution, pesticides, chemical runoff, changes in farming practices and climate change, and is written very accessibly and compellingly. Dave Goulson is well qualified to write about this, being a Professor of Biology, an expert on insect ecology and an Ambassador for the UKs Wildlife Trusts. Get a copy if you can.

So progress on the build is steady as we move through the highland winter. I’m starting to think about seeds and have ordered seed potatoes, onion sets and garlic. We’re still eating red cabbage and kale from the croft, at least what the deer haven’t eaten.

Soon, now. Spring is coming. Not long now.

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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.