En-route to Islay our first two-legged summer visitors arrived in time for coffee on Monday. After refreshment and the guided tour Phil and Ruth got stuck in and we cleared the remaining larch from the east of the house and stacked it out of the way, up beside the drive.
Before:
After:
After lunch and more tidying we attacked the hole with the water and electric in it, embedding and burying the service ducts in gravel, marking with warning tape – yellow for electric and blue for water – and then filling with stones and soil scraped in from a heap to the north. The heap quickly revealed itself to be another solid rocky outcrop to go with the one by our front door. A future landscape feature…
Having two extra people to help was a most productive luxury and having used all the immediately available spoil and half filled the hole we knocked off early to visit a local beach. After these last unusually dry few months the bog behind the beach was more walkable and we managed to get to the large rocky outcrop that according to the map is yet another dun. It was covered in a haze of bluebells and half a dozen sand martins were swooping round. At first I was at a loss to think where they might nest, then recalled the hillock further across the marsh; it has a sheer sandy face and from the far end of the dun we could see it, with a line of holes just under the turf of its top edge. I don’t know much about these birds, but discovering local nesting sites reminds me of those I’ve come across before, all in rather special places, from a knee high, burn side bank at Mull’s most famous beach, to drainage pipes in the tow path walls of the Lea Navigation in Hackney.
Thanks for your help, Phil and Ruth!
Back in the house I started protecting pipes and cables from the forthcoming assault of the thousands of screws I’ll be using to fix OSB and plasterboard to the walls. I used the simple metal plates with four short spikes on the back that you hammer in to stud or dwang to shield the pipe or cable beneath and in no time had used the hundred I ‘d bought. Order more! In a few places, where on outside walls the dwangs are treble height (to further stiffen the structure) I wanted full height protection so cut pieces from roofing offcuts and glued the flat steel in place.
The electrician drilled several new holes in the outside walls for outside lights or sockets, all making the house less airtight. Each hole had a close-fitting plastic pipe sticking through it, so I went round, taking out the protruding cables, pushing the outside end of the pipe flush to the larch and cutting off the inside, leaving enough to seal with airtight tape and mastic. This is not perfect but it’s the best I can do as the airtight membrane is sandwiched within the wall construction, where I can’t really get at it.
The easiest bit of the east wall to start applying OSB was the stairwell as it has no windows and fewest services. I cut the extra layer of glass wool insulation, laid it in place and started fixing panels. Pretty straight forward, but it made me realise I’m going to need a clear plan, rigorously followed, of exactly where on the timber frames I’ll be screwing.
After the first two boards I’d used nearly two hundred screws, as specified on the engineer’s drawing, one per 100mm. I have another 1400 but will need more.
Through this last week tools and materials have been arriving: plasterboard for ceilings upstairs; paper tape, filler and tools for joining them seamlessly; timber for the coomb walls and cupboards; OSB. The OSB arrived damaged. I pointed this out to the driver who I think wouldn’t have mentioned it, had I not noticed. It’s been damaged, he said, but it’s the last they had so they sent it anyway. If you can’t use it we’ll swap it… when we have new stock. This seems symptomatic of both the current national shortage of building materials and my local builders’ merchant. As the OSB is specifically for structural purposes I said I couldn’t use the damaged pieces, so at least seven out of fifteen will go back. I could probably have done some horse trading but felt like making the point; they should at least have apologised, mentioned the damage and offered a discount.
Hopefully the OSB I have in hand, along with the plasterboard and timber, will keep me going until the replacement are delivered. So some OSB and plasterboard lie on pallets, wrapped against the rain that the garden and wider landscape so badly need.
The latest date for installation of the photovoltaics is next Friday, a week away. It was meant to be today but a pulled muscle has diminished the team.
Fuzzy but great colours in the wet.
A sustainable house for unsustainable times... 