Life, self-build and much mud on the Isle of Skye
When the sun rises and you wake up to your bedroom windows all covered in these exquisite ice ferns.
I’ve never seen such a beautiful natural phenomenon.
As the sun rose these gradually melted and disappeared, leaving a bright, cold blue snowy day.
What a truly remarkable start to the day.
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!
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.
There’s been a distinct drop in temperature over the last few days. Enough for a sharp intake of breath whilst slipping legs between bedsheets at night. I think we may have to put the electric blanket back on. That alone saved us last winter, I’m sure of it.
The hedgerows are full of blackberries which we must find time to get out and plunder. Autumn isn’t worth having without homemade apple and blackberry pies.
The shed is now built and it’s so startlingly big that I did warn husband that if we weren’t in the house soon we’d be moving the bed into it. It’s better insulated than the caravan and you could seriously house entire families in there.
I know better than to get used to its exquisite emptiness, though. It’ll be full of boxes and building material in no time, and glimpses of the floor will soon become a rarity.
The house build continues after a few weeks hiatus with husbands back problems. We will clear the building materials out over the next week and hopefully continue the electrics, kitchens and bathrooms.
We’ve been testing Osmo oil wood treatments on slips of spare wood for the cladding in the bathrooms. The second coat is drying at the moment then we’ll head in and compare. Everything looks so different in situ. The light makes a huge difference.
We also made a second visit to Skye Sawmills yesterday to try and source oak planks for our sills.
The challenge is those enormous windows in the living area, which will need 4m long pieces, something that it’s proving almost impossible to find. If possible I didn’t want joins.
Brendan didn’t have oak that long, however he did have something interesting – old church pew planks from a dismantled church in Broadford. They’re at least 150 years old, burnished to a patina with the feverish righteousness of all those worshippers bottoms.
I love the idea of reusing old wood from a local church, and having a bit of history in our sparingly new home, so if the price is right we’d love to take them.
The holiest sills on the island!
Whilst storm Malik rages, whipping the tarpaulined piles of material stored at the front of the house into a frenzy, progress inside the house continues slowly.
The wind was huge last night. It was apparently gusting to about eighty miles per hour, and it was so loud that it was almost impossible to sleep. The caravan was dancing in the wind, walls flexing and straining hard against the webbing straps that hold it down.
Morning brought a damage assessment between the storm flurries. Nothing too serious thankfully – a few pipes blown out of place, the bin and bits of wood and building material blown across the croft, and the cover on the rotary clothes dryer totally disappeared . I suspect it’s flown all the way to Norway by now.
We have a few more days of this predicted so we will be battening down the hatches and riding it out as best we can.
On the house front, we have an almost plasterboarded corridor and hall now. Progress.
It makes such a difference to see walls inside rather than just spaces. I’ve been struggling with the kitchen design and colours, unable to tell how much light the room will have, but over the next few weeks I should be in a position to see exactly what it will look like. Then I will need to get my skates on and get finalising selections..
It’s true that these days we almost have too much choice. Although having said that, I can never find quite what I have in my minds eye. I seem to have a remarkable ability to love what is not trending at the moment, making it difficult to source. I will slap myself into decisions soon.
Storm Arwen swept in over the last few days bringing a significant drop in temperature, and with it, snow.
It was difficult to see the mountains of Knoydart in the flurries of snow and sleet sweeping down the sound, but once it had cleared we were treated to a scene of absolute beauty.
The low winter sun lit up the slopes of the mountains and the skies were blue and crisp. Somehow the air always seems cleaner and colours more vibrant after a storm.
We were not as badly affected by the storm as the East coast and other parts of the UK, surprisingly. The caravan rocked alarmingly in the wind and the hail and sleet were relentless for about 24 hours, but we didn’t lose power or water, so we figured we’d got off lightly compared to some.
The morning was so stunning that we decided to get out to enjoy it.
We popped down to our local pub at lunchtime and warmed ourselves by their open wood fire. They had local hogget (lamb) on as a Sunday roast , and one warming plateful later, with a pint of Skye Ale to wash it down, we drove back to the croft replete and content.
There is always blue sky after a storm.
The islanders call late snows in April Lambing Snows. They’re usually the last gasp of winter and come suddenly, just when the lambs are being born in the fields.
We went from bright, warm days to plummeting temperatures within 24 hours. The wind veered suddenly to the North and before we knew it, there were snow blizzards upon us, sweeping rapidly down the Sound in ominous curtains of grey.
Luckily the only thing in the outdoor raised beds were garlic, onions and perpetual leeks. Listening to local advice I’d held off planting out anything tender, and don’t plan to until May. It seems that this advice was very sound!
Temperatures fell to minus 5 degrees centigrade overnight, and barely struggled to hit 2 degrees during the day. The wind was bitingly cold.
Nothing for it but to hunker down indoors..
The weather on the island has taken a turn for the worse since the Spring Equinox.
As if to laugh at our feeble attempts to plant, a prolonged few days of stormage has reminded us that Winter hasn’t done with us yet.
A neighbour brought us a huge bag of wild garlic picked from local woodlands, which was most welcome. I chopped the fragrant leaves through salad and reserved the plants that still had their bulbs and roots attached so that we could plant them on the croft.
Husband dug them into a damp, grassy bank above the stream under dappled shade. Hopefully they’ll take and we’ll have the start of our own wild garlic patch before too long.
Just as he finished the planting, the heavens opened. We’ve now had a solid 48 hours of hail, rain and high winds, and it’s not abating any time soon.
Our tiny burn went from a gentle trickle of water to this rushing torrent within hours…
We awoke this morning to a white blanket of snow over everything again. The temperatures had fallen overnight and it had snowed for several hours.
Getting up and started is the hardest thing when it’s cold like this.
Breakfast was taken by the fire with both of us wrapped up in a blanket, bobble hats and fingerless gloves until the fire gradually warmed the room.
We watched as the light changed constantly around us, the skies moving from thunderous grey to bright blue and back again as the storm fronts raced across the sky.
The snow is properly deep now, and the access track to the croft is icy and compacted and probably impassable for the moment, unless it was an emergency.
This would of course happen as I was about to replenish food stores with my regular shop, but we have plenty of stores, and bread flour and yeast to make rolls. The small oven here would struggle with a big loaf but it manages rolls and smaller breads just fine.
I’ve been baking every day, and making soup, curries and stews to make sure that we stay warm.
I know that this would send some people absolutely stir crazy, but I quite like it. It’s quiet and cosy. We have the work on the house, our books, cooking and seed planning and planting to keep us busy.
Contentment.
It snowed again overnight. We awoke to brilliant white, and the strange, blanketing silence that a covering of snow brings to the world.
Silence that is, apart from the raven, who called loudly from the old pine as the sun came up.
Husband managed to get out to insulate the water pipes yesterday, just in the nick of time. We had running water this morning for coffee, despite the overnight temperatures.
We’re cracking on with the interior wall foiling now, fuelled by hot coffee and egg butties.
Even though the house is a shell without insulated flooring or plasterboard yet, the solar gain from the big, south facing windows, coupled with a small 3kw heater is maintaining a temperature of about 13 degrees centigrade.
Which considering the temperature outside, and the volume of air to heat in this 200m2 space, is pretty good.
We think that this bodes well for when the house is fully insulated and sealed. It should be very energy efficient and cheap to heat.
Just what we need.
We’ve had several nights of temperatures well below freezing, and although these have brought clear, beautiful winter days, they’ve also brought frozen pipes.
We run the water supply to the caravan overground from the house. It’s a temporary measure – we don’t want to have to dig the pipes in under the drive as the caravan won’t be here once the house build is complete.
However, this leaves them very exposed to the weather.
Waking up to a cold caravan, sometimes with ice on the inside of the windows is one thing, but switching on the tap to fill the kettle for coffee and realising that there is no water coming through is an altogether different level of morning discomfort.
On a couple of occasions in the last few weeks we’ve woken to this and husband has had to head out in jumper, dressing gown and wellies to try and thaw them out.
Insulation for the pipe has now been ordered and will be installed as soon as the weather permits..
In the meatime we now store large canisters of water in the caravan so that when this happens next, as it will with the worst of the winter months still to get through, we can at least have a mug of hot coffee before heading out to attempt the defrosting process..
Ravencroft Skye 