Anorak in Argyll

On Monday, with the stairs assembled and (more or less) in place David dropped by on his way south and gave me a hand for the day. Hereabouts it wasn’t a bank holiday. We gave each back corner of the stairs a permanent leg and supported the top with a couple of temporary timbers screwed to the joists. With the benefit of that security we removed the screws into the stud walls and the temporary packers, replacing them with continuous strips of timber, screwed and glued near the bottom of the stringers. We also managed to shove the stairs back a few millimetres to re-establish the 700mm clearance between the foot of the stairs and the nearest door – a building standards’ requirement to allow for the possibility of fitting a stair-lift.

While fitting the stairs with Patryk it seemed the fifteen millimetres of stair that should have stuck up above the first floor had been lost – this was to accommodate the thickness of the proposed finished flooring. I assumed there had been a misunderstanding or a mistake by the manufacturer, and accepted that we’d just have to get by with Lino or something else very thin, but with the stairs freed from the walls we managed to jack up the top to the planned height. Miraculously this hadn’t thrown out the levels of the steps – side to side and front to back – and the newel posts were still plumb. Before finishing we looked at the balustrade and mooted how it might sit, trying to minimise the visual impact, and David had the great idea that the bottom rail could be rebated to cover the ends of the proposed floorboards…

David asked what was preventing my finishing cladding the end of the plant room. Ostensibly it was that a further electrical penetration needs to be made, but with the current fair weather it made sense to do as much as I could; the boards were all cut and ready, so I spent Tuesday fitting them – a bit of a squeeze working between the house and air source heat pump.

I took Wednesday off in lieu of Saturday and haunted the tidal stretch of river. I was there just after eight am. A tattered ribbon of mist lingered over the water. A clear, windless and midgy morning, but as the day warmed a sea breeze developed and the midges melted away. The tide flowed in, filling the pool below the bridge, mullet nosing the calm surface leaving a wake of ripples. Further upstream, midmorning, a small bird arrowed along the bank, flying fast, low and direct and diverting slightly to give me a wider berth. A kingfisher! A wasn’t even sure there were any here. At teatime I sat in the open boot of the car by the bridge watching a long winged bird beating the air over the pool. It climbed, dropped, dropped some more and paused, before disappearing vertically behind the bridge. Perhaps fifteen seconds later the osprey flew out from the other side of the bridge, a fifteen inch fish in its claws.

Several times in the last fortnight twenty-five or thirty swallows have assembled on and swooped around the house, youths at the community centre. Perched birds attending to their feathers. Several flew in and out of the porch, maybe casing the joint for next year…

On Thursday and Friday I continued with the stairs, cutting and fitting more long packing pieces to glue and screw along the tops edge of the stringers. This was fairly labour intensive, the wood having to be cut to the right (varying) thickness and cut to match the shape of the particular stringer…

These top packing strips allow me to put in further big screws to attach stairs to house.

So that’s it, my past week. Meanwhile the shower tray has arrived and my plumbing thread sealant and replacement MDF riser are on their way. The blackberries and fungi beckon.