Refocus

STOP PRESS: two woodcock feeding beside the track on plot five in the dark.

It feels good to have the guttering in place and working…

Tash is down south, supporting her family and as a ferry foot passenger I went to Islay to see David for a bit of a weekend, adjusted to fit CalMac’s ferry times. Going out on Friday’s 07.30 boat I was so tired I put my head on the table and missed our house. On Islay David asked what my next main task was and I said it was the water tank shed and plaster boarding. Back home on Sunday afternoon I gave my neighbour the same answer but woke on Monday realising the house flue is still the most pressing job.

Despite this realisation I did other things; looking at the plumbing rearrangements needed to fit the bath taps and spout; measuring up for a hearth stone; checking how much battening I need for the entrance hall ceiling and the low wall in Bed 1; removing shuttering from the water tank foundation slab and considering how to progress the shed and plumbing. And on Tuesday I drove to Lochgilphead to dispose of unburnable wood and other building detritus, collect battening, and buy food.

Once again I find myself having to refocus; for me this is a big part of the challenge and it happens repeatedly. What I need is a simple task I can pick up and put down, to fill gaps when a more complicated job has to pause. Hopefully some of the plaster boarding upstairs will be such a task.

As I’ve said before, cutting a hole in the ceiling and the roof is daunting and it’s still daunting despite having practiced on the workshop. Fear of making a serious mistake still lurks, I’d been feeling weary and there seemed a lot of inertia to overcome. On Wednesday I felt fresh and well rested so I began; I moved the scaffolding tower indoors, resisted the urge to recalculate the guideline that I’d marked on the wall (settling for a rough check) and set to…

This is the same process as for the workshop so you might want to skip it, or skim through the photos.

The Pavatex wood fibre sarking board looks like this before it is slotted together.

Near the bottom of my photo above you can see how tightly the Pavatex slots together and that it was put on over the top of the glass wool (which had been laid over the OSB ceiling), wisps of which have been trapped in the join.

The hole’s position seems to be about right, so I take the scaffolding down and at the last moment it starts to lean suddenly and wilfully towards the expensive window (they’re all expensive!). I don’t have enough hands to manage this safely but somehow skew it all so it rests on the wall and I get the last bits back under control.

Once the scaffolding is up outside I can get the roof ladder in place and I put up the ordinary ladder to help me remeasure where I think the guide hole in the tin roof should be. It will mark the centre of the bigger, oval hole for the flue but because of the roof’s slope it’s not equidistant between the centres of the battens; I have to make sure I’ve got it right. When I’ve drilled the hole I’ll hang a string through it and attach a plumb-bob indoors. Rain stops play a couple of times so I give up for the day and start fixing battening on the coomb wall in bedroom 1 so the plasterboard at the back of the cupboard can hide the electric cables.

The next day is drier so I drill that hole, thread the string and cover the top with tape then take the roof ladder and scaffolding down again, thinking as I do so that I’ll have to put it all up again when I finally come to cut the bigger hole and assemble the flue. In fact I think I’ll need two scaffold towers, one in and one out.

I reassemble the scaffolding indoors, too busy to worry whether I’ll find the hole where I want it to be.

But there it is, the tail of string hanging through the tin roof. I attach a lead weight and the vertical line falls astonishingly close to the centre of my marks. I drilled the hole slightly to one side so I could keep it on the top of a roof corrugation. This is my insurance against wet weather and a delay getting the final flue up and sealed.

With everything seeming to line up I marked the larger hole on the sarking board then spent the rest of yesterday and most of today fiddling around with the level and the multi-tool to fit the metal sleeve as snuggly and vertically as possible. Cutting a circular, vertical hole through a thick slanting board is a tricky thing and working out which piece of board still needs trimming is the constant puzzle. The resulting dust and fluff filled the air and covered me.

The metal sleeve is to prevent anything flammable touching the double walled flue which under normal conditions can reach about 250 degrees C.

Once the sleeve fitted well enough I set it aside. In order to finally fit it it will have to be cut into pieces and reassembled round the flue and the rafter bracket.

The rafter bracket.

Four blocks of sturdy timber screwed to the rafters support the swivelling bracket and the plumb-bob is the centre of everything, literally.

This bracket will hold the higher vertical section of flue and below will be a short diagonal run to connect the lower vertical section that rises from the stove, but I’ve been puzzling over how to work out from the top section (whose location is fixed by where it must exit the roof) where precisely the bottom section will be. This bottom section determines where the stove will stand. The answer seems to be the plumb line.

But I’ll save that for next week and try to illustrate it simply.

I was blessed with the benefits of a sunset I couldn’t see but which briefly and spectacularly cast its low red light over the autumn woods.