Week Thirteen – Part Two

We are up bright and early because we are expecting the lorry with the kit at 8am. We are getting all the tools, nails and screws out and set-up near the slabs. The generator is our next task and now Andrew has arrived but the lorry isn’t here.

Andrew explains how he thinks the day should shape up and this fires up our excitement and enthusism even more. As Andrew begins unpacking his tools Simon, Scott and Eoghain arrive. These four guys are going to be doing most of the work along with the Hiab (lorry driver/crane) operator. We will be the support act.

The Hiab operator, David, has arrived in a van to check out the site and he and Andrew decide where best to set up the Hiab.

We haven’t had to wait long for the Hiab to arrive and we are reunited with the kit we built back in June. Today is the day we find out if we did a good job and measured the panels accurately enough so that they all fit together with no gaps or no panels too long.

David is setting up the Hiab to lift the first stack of panels near the shed slab. It’s an easy lift for this powerful machine.

Simon and Andrew unpack the first stack and we are going to manually lift each of the shed panels into place.

Ther first panel is manipulated into place.

We need the help of the Hiab because the shed door has a big steel girder running along the top and would be a bit much to lift manually, although the guys would give it a go, given half a chance.

Within an hour the final panel is being hoisted into place.

The second stack is delivered onto the house slab by David who is in the background with his remote control gizmo.

Pete is unpacking the stack as David and Andrew place the first panel of the house, you can see the view through our bedroom window.

It’s lunchtime already and the team have erected all the shed walls and half of the house. What an amazing day this is.

The final panel, which will contain the double doors onto the garden, is being dropped nicely into position.

We are ecstatic! Up until this point we could never be sure that we had built the kit properly, we followed the plans but being novices we could easily have made some big mistakes. Woooohoooo!

This will be the view from the guest bedroom. Once we have planted the garden it will be even nicer.

The internal walls are going up so we can now get a sense of what the inside will feel like and the proportions of the rooms.

We are back at the shed and with the headers fixed around the top of the frames, we are ready to hoist the gables into place.

Just as we are finishing fitting the gables on the shed the lorry with the roof trusses and joists arrives. It’s been a long journey for the driver, coming from Inverness, because his load was too high to get over the Connel Bridge and under the railway bridge just beyond Connel. He had to go the long way round adding two hours to the journey.

The Hiab, with David in control, only just manages to lift the roof trusses over the house for storage. This is neccessary because we have such limited space for storing our materials.

A massive thanks go to the amazing team of (l to r) Simon, Eoghain, Andrew and Scott. They worked so hard under a burning sun and were a pleasure for us to be around. None of this could have happened without their help.

We are delighted with the way things are working out and that our house is taking shape. This has been a massive day for us and we have been smiling a lot and feeling quite emotional about it all.

We owe Andrew, our guru, a debt of gratitude because he believes in us and supports us in our effort to build a house for ourselves. A mad undertaking at our stage in life, some would say, but Andrew gets it.