Almost cladding

I’m looking forward to actually fixing some larch boards on the walls for the protection and the visual transformation it will bring, but preparation continues. Since completing the reveals of three windows I’ve been pushing on with battening and fire-stop. The latter is now finished and the battening, stained a delightful blue that comes off on your hands, is done on all but the lean-to. Battening has not been without its challenges, the greatest being how it highlighted the unevenness of the external corners; the counter-battens were not all dead plumb and their faces were not aligned. To some degree this can be corrected by tightening or slackening the screws that hold them to the underlying house structure, pinning the wood fibre insulation between, but the underlying insulation of the gable ends seems to protrude beyond that of the side elevations so there’s a step of about a centimetre. In addition there were no counter-battens on the corners because there’s nothing solid at the corners to fix them to, so I added them as ‘floating’ uprights, supported by all the battens from the two adjacent walls. The multi-tool again proved invaluable and I used it to rebate either the floating counter-battens or the battens.

If I started this process again I’d make sure there was an agreement about the verticality of corners as left by the builders – part of my difficulty lies in recognising what I’m dealing with and knowing the options open to me – to be fair, I don’t think the builders realise where what they leave will cause me a headache. There’s a somewhat unpredictable and elastic gap of understanding between us…

Window reveals – I’m sure there are different methods, but this is what I was shown, given the general lack of handy structure to fix to:

Before cladding the south gable I have to fix the reveals on the three and a half metre long sliding window. That in itself is a bit of a challenge, partly because of the size of the pieces of timber involved, but also because I have no spares and without a sill to form the bottom of the construction I can’t see how to fix the bottom of the sides in place… Andrew and Ali are coming over tomorrow to take the hinges off the broken skylight so I’ll ask him…

Intumescent board – fire-stop – in action. I had a slim off-cut and was interested to see it get hot, so we got the blowtorch on it.

Nature and stuff – Tash has bought, filled and hung numerous bird feeders where we can see them from the windows. That wasn’t good enough so now there are three, each within centimetres of a window. There are surprising numbers of blue tits, many great tits and a pair of coal tits. Long tailed tits appeared today but not at the feeders. Two neighbours have reported a merlin… When will the first siskins and redpolls come? Yesterday about a mile along the Kilberry Road Tash saw a red squirrel.