The day has come. The polycrub is being installed.
With luck, the day dawned clear and dry on the island, with no wind. The joiners arrived first thing and after confirming door and window preferences, immediately set to work.
The hoops installed
The ground holes have been drilled, the wooden posts have been concreted in and the plastic pipes have been manoeuvred into place. It looked like the carcass of a whale with the hoops sticking out of the ground like ribs for a while until it was covered with polycarbonate.
The wooden struts that hold the hoops rigid have been installed, and the wooden skirt has been built. The first three sheets of polycarbonate have been laid onto the hoops and secured.
Wooden struts going on
A good days work.
Polycarbonate sheeting being affixed
There is still much to be done with the construction of the door and the windows for the gables as well as the rest of the polycarbonate sheeting to be laid. But I can already get a feel for it’s size and robustness.
End of day one
I’m very excited. Tomatoes, chillies, cucumbers, squashes, strawberries and courgettes here we come!
So, just as I was sowing a few trays of vegetable seeds and contemplating getting my potatoes into the ground, it snowed.
Basil seedlings under the blue UV lights of doom
It’s the lambing snow. Every year in March or April it happens, apparently, just as the lambs are born. Poor things. My seedlings have visibly shrunk back into the soil in horror at the prospect of emerging into such sub zero temperatures.
I feel so cruel tempting them into germination on a heat pad in the caravan only for them to swiftly realise the reality that they’ve been born into..
Gherkinage!
I’m hoping for milder temperatures and a break in the rain and sleet so that I can carry on preparing the raised beds and get a few hardy things out there. It’s bitterly cold out there at the moment.
Rather leggy looking tomato seedlings
The polycrub is supposed to be being installed next week, and at the moment the site that it will sit in is a bit of a quagmire.
I’ve always wanted a polycrub. As soon as I set eyes on this windswept, exposed croft I knew that it was our best chance of growing anything.
The polycrub
For those of you unfamiliar with this divine beast, a polycrub is a growing tunnel, like a polytunnel. The difference is that it is made from recycled fish farm piping and rigid polycarbonate sheeting, making it very strong.
It is designed and made on the Shetland Isles, where it was developed to cope with the exceptionally strong winds and stormy growing conditions there. It’s guaranteed for up to 120 mph winds, so it can withstand anything that the Isle of Skye climate can throw at it.
Recycled salmon farm piping
I love that it’s made from sustainable and recycled materials, and that it’s so strong. The first year of growing taught me that our biggest challenge on this exposed site was going to be the wind. We will plant shelter belts to help the raised beds, but this will provide much greater protection for a wide variety of crops.
Excitement has peaked this week with the arrival of the man and digger to level the site, and the delivery of the kit itself. The joiner will be here in two weeks time to construct it. We are installing it between the raised beds and the compost bins in the growing area of the croft.
Man & mini digger
As I write, a snow storm has just swept across the sound. It may be the last day of March but the challenging conditions continue, and my seedlings need protection. I can’t wait for the polycrub to be up and running.
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.
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.
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.
Rain is lashing down in torrents from a leaden grey sky as I write. There’s ice in it too, and a stiff north westerly wind to drive it home.
From the caravan
The badly fitting, single glazed windows of the caravan don’t seem to provide much protection against this weather as I peer out into the gloom. I’m well wrapped up with three layers, including thermals, and I’m still chilly.
We’ve had an incredible run of storms so far this year, one right upon the coat tails of the previous one. Storms Corrie, Dudley, Eunice and Franklin have rolled over the island in the last six weeks in rapid succession, bringing 80 mph winds, hail and snow with little respite in between.
We’ve had very disturbed sleep this past month as the worst of the winds seem to come after dark. When they start, the caravan rocks and shudders as if it’s alive, straining against the lorry straps that lash it down like a wounded animal.
The noise of the hailstorms is deafening. It’s impossible to sleep through. It’s as if someone is emptying buckets of marbles into a tin bath on your head. Even burrowing further under the warmth of the duvet doesn’t dull the noise.
Image Francis Yeats
I bake. I make bread and cakes to warm and sustain us. I make soups and stews and sweet, eggy puddings and crumbles.
Brioche buns. Just because.
I venture out in the small, quiet pockets of calm between the storms and wonder at the crofts capacity to hold water. Everything is sodden, soaked.
I wear many layers. Recently I’ve taken to wearing my fingerless gloves in the caravan during the day to keep my hands warm. Tea has become an important, warming ritual in the afternoons, hands wrapped around the comforting heat of the mug.
In a world where there are a million variations on every theme, buying fittings for a house from scratch is not the fun job that you might imagine. It’s an endlessly exhausting task.
For those of you that have followed this journey from the beginning, you’ll know that we’re running a few years behind the original build schedule. Many of the design decisions and selections that we made in 2019 are either no longer available, now too expensive, or our thoughts have changed.
Things viewed in London don’t look the same here in the cool northern light of Skye.
I’ve been struggling with the kitchen design of our new build for years. The kitchen is the most important room in the house for me, cooking as much as I do. Part of the challenge I suspect is that these days every kitchen has an island. Ours doesn’t. So the photos that I see daily of kitchen designs and finishes just don’t look anything like the space we’ve got.
The second challenge that I have is that I don’t like “shiny”. Shiny, or gloss kitchens, can be wonderful in the right setting, but I’ve always preferred matt, natural, textured surfaces. It’s just the way I am. These types of kitchen have gradually started to come more into vogue in the last eighteen months, so it’s not as difficult as it once was to find selections, but every kitchen professional that I’ve spoken to has started from this point, and I simply get exhausted explaining preferences and correcting assumptions over and over again.
The third challenge is that I want a work surface that is as bulletproof and as maintenance-free as I can get it. I cook a lot and I know that at some point I’m going to cut on these surfaces, splash something on them that will stain, or put a red-hot pan down as I rush to run a burnt hand under a tap. What can I say, I’m a messy cook.
All of these things are possible to protect against in some of the modern materials available today, like Silestone or Dekton, but they come with a steep price tag.
The last challenge is that no matter what your budget, large or small, in this Inflationary, Brexit, Pandemic Britain, costs have gone through the roof in the last eighteen months. Which means in very real terms what you want now becomes increasingly expensive. Compromises become the norm.
Choices are, however, slowly being made. The poor Postie hefts box after box of flooring and tile samples over the caravan threshold with a pitying smile.
I vacillate between tasteful, subtle Scandi grey/blue/moss colours and a need for bright, warm tones. I’ll end up with a weirdly eclectic mix, I’m sure of it. Which is absolutely fine. This is home.
Husband is keen to have good, strong kitchen carcasses. I’m keen to have good worktops, plain slab cabinet doors painted in a matt finish, and well designed lighting.
I’m already thinking of my rapidly approaching dotage with dimming eyesight and shaky grip.
February is well into its stride, and despite relatively mild temperatures, the storms just keep coming. We’ve got gale warnings again for next week, and most evenings the caravan is rocking away like a bucking bronco here on the side of our windswept croft.
We’ve learned never to overfill mugs of tea and to hold onto things as we move from room to room. Craziness!
Using my lovely Christmas gifted Borja Moronto jugs for soy sauce
So what’s a girl to do whilst the weather is stopping her getting out on the croft? She makes sushi. Of course she does.
Sushi rolls awaiting slicing
I haven’t made sushi at home for many years. We used to eat it a lot in London where Japanese food outlets were good and readily available.
Not feeling confident that I could get sushi grade fresh fish I decided to err on the side of caution and use cooked or smoked fish instead of raw. In this case tuna mayo, smoked salmon, cooked prawns and smoked mackerel, all from my normal supermarket shop. I managed to get wasabi, nori and even cooked crispy onions for coating some of the rolls.
Crispy onions – I could eat these by the spoonful
The biggest challenge in the tiny caravan kitchen was making room to assemble the rolls. It took a bit of shuffling and manoeuvring, and was a much fiddlier process than in a spacious kitchen with lots of worktop space.
I won’t go into detail here, but let’s just say that any flat surface was fair game (toaster, I thank you) and that it was inelegant in the extreme.
But amazingly they worked. And they tasted great.
Next time I may try making vegetarian sushi. I could imagine that using roasted butternut squash, avocado, cucumber, sweet potato and peppers would work just as well as these fish based fillings.
Never let fear of failure or lack of space stop you trying something new. You can usually always find a way.
The days are definitely lengthening now , perceptibly so. Spring should be on its way, although no one seems to have told the weather gods that. It’s still hail, snow and gales most days.
I did a quick rustle about in the raised beds this week and although I should be clearing and planting soon, it’s still far too cold and wet. The garlic has popped it’s head up a little, but that’s it.
I’ve ordered the polycrub. We did apply for a crofters grant to help with the cost, but we were unsuccessful. They wanted a five year business plan showing anticipated horticultural sales and letters of guarantee from local outlets that they would take our produce.
This isn’t the way that we’ve planned to do things. We will sell produce at the croft gate if we have any surplus, but we are mainly growing for ourselves and our neighbours, not as a fully commercial enterprise. As such we don’t qualify. We’re disappointed, of course, but we’ve bitten the bullet and gone ahead with buying the polycrub anyway.
Polycrub loveliness
It’s six metres by four of rigid polycarbonate sheeting, fish-farm tube loveliness. After the last few months of storms I’m doubly convinced that this is the only thing that would survive the winds on this exposed hillside.
Seed porn
It will revolutionise what we can grow, though. Tomatoes, chillies, squash, cherries, basil… lots of tender plants that wouldn’t thrive in our cold, windswept raised beds. We hope to have it installed in April, just in time to move crops in there for the summer.
Very exciting!
Now to clear out the caravan spare room out from a whole year of being a junk room, and set it back up to start seedling production again. It will be good to see the blue grow lights illuminating the hillside once more.. 😊
Ravencroft Skye 