Lying around

I’ve spent the best part of three days crouching and then lying down around the outside of the house, weeding and scraping peas and stones away from the Isoquick foam foundation, then reapplying lime render.

I trimmed up last week’s repair to the foam and am happy with the result. Once the render is on and the stoned replaced it should never again be seen.

The render (Baumit super fine RK 70N) comes ready mixed in a bag, easy to mix in a bucket with trowel and then a whizzer in a drill. When mixed it is well behaved and easy to apply; I used flexible steel scrapers/spatula, a wider one and a narrower one to apply and finish it. As I spent most of my rendering time lying on my side, my hawk was less convenient than the bucket, also lying on its side. I lay on a mat of cardboard and heavy duty polythene, enough to soften the worst of the angular stones. Working in the limited space between the house and the air source heat pump I had to narrow the mat accordingly, lying on the less than luxurious angular concrete rubble.

I worked my way round the house, leaving just the corner where water collects, to do once I’ve installed the drainage channels across the drive.

As I started to work on the the long wall of the entrance, a rain of spidery black particles fell into the wet render…

I was aghast. This is my vermin-proof stainless steel wire mesh, so completely rusted it crumbles between my fingers. It wasn’t stainless and it wasn’t corten (a kind of steel where the rust forms a protective barrier). It was just rust. This was alarming; it meant that rats, mice, bees, wasps, anything really, had free access to the cosy space behind my larch cladding and free access to the all-important waterproof membrane. The good news is that only two walls – seven and a half metres in total – had this defective mesh; elsewhere, including the workshop, the stainless steel is a shiny as when it was applied. I called Andrew the builder and took him a sample. He’d never seen anything like it. Currently busy trying to build his new bothy ready to move into by July, he gave me a new (three hundred quid) roll of new mesh and said if I couldn’t work out a good way to apply it he’d come by as soon as he could. Retro-fitting the mesh is difficult but in the meantime I need to stop things getting up behind the cladding…

Sunshine, warm air and a lively breeze dried the render too quickly, so I wetted it with a brush, protected it with boards and wrapped some of it in wet cardboard.

All around the house a strip about eighteen inches wide will be filled with crushed slate (or similar), held up with a timber kerb and filled to the shoulder of the rendered Isoquick. Once it’s dry, next week, I’ll paint the render with special lime paint, helping protect the render, the dark grey I’ve chosen making it less visible.

Having had quite enough of lying on my side out of doors, I emptied and removed three drawers in the kitchen and fitted the new larch face, hiding the white side of the Ikea cupboard. So that’s another bit of stuff out of the workshop!

Another short larch board, with a planed face, I prepared – bevelling the edges, sanding it and putting on a first coat of beeswax polish. Unless we find a more charming board washed up on the Firth of Forth this weekend, we’ll put this up by the front door with coat hooks on it.

Enough building.

Natural stuff and leisure: Tash has been cording, practicing making string out of whatever she can lay her hands on – skunk cabbage, yellow flag iris, soft rush, dead grass from a high tide and daffodil – then starting to loop and weave it into things… Nettle and bramble are next, then there’s willow, wych elm bark and lime bast, not to mention spruce roots (plenty of those).

We’d planned a fire for Beltane but it rained. The swallows didn’t mind, collecting mud, algae and grass for their nest. Briefly there was a third swallow, the three birds chasing at speed, but today we’re back to two, the male with spectacularly long and fine streamers. A buzzard and a crow seemed to be in combat, but as we watched it looked more like a game of tag. One would chase and harass, then they’d swap and then swap back, tables turned. I’m not quite convinced that it was play, more like sparring and probing the defences and capabilities of the other. Taking a chance I ran in for my binoculars, but when I got out had lost sight of the birds, then I saw the buzzard rise above the trees, except it wasn’t the buzzard, it was an osprey, between us and the castle, headed towards the loch. We’re pretty sure this was one of the pair from Gooseberry Cottage, who hadn’t arrive when we visited the nest a few weeks back. The pair from the top of the loch have been at home for some time.

Today, as I lay on the stony ground applying lime plaster, I became conscious of shrill and rapid calls – hawk alert! Where was it? I looked up to see both swallows and a hawk only metres away from me and the swallows’ nest. No wonder they were sounding the alarm. They drove the hawk away and up, a siskin joining in, and then the hawk, resigned to its loss of surprise, drifted up and away, biding its time.

Early in the week, wheeling a barrow of weeds up to the bonfire pile, I became aware of a purring. Books liken it to the sound of an old-fashioned fly-fishing reel: the sound of a grasshopper warbler. My phone recording renders it more clearly than I heard it first hand. It was only metres away but unseen, somewhere on our plot between me and the communal track. Last year I heard one on our plot, but once only. Then it was gone, moved on.

This lying down thing is pretty good; birds ignore you. The scratchy song of a common whitethroat reached my ears and I looked round carefully until I spotted it in a nearby birch, the grey and brown plumage nothing to speak of but the eponymous white throat gleaming.

DDD

EEE

FFF