Week Nine

Week beginning 1st August.

Our friends from Portobello, Katie, Martin and their son Peter, arrived last night and we had dinner in our caravan and had a great chin wag over a few too many wines, but it was fun.

This morning Molly needs to rest so Pete is going with them for a canoe on Loch Awe. It’s such a beautiful day so he show’s them the beach we discovered when we went canoeing with our family a few weeks ago.

It’s such a lovely hot day but Pete thinks a visit to St Conan’s Kirk won’t go amiss because it is so interesting and it’s cool inside, giving us all a wee break from the heat of the sun.

A call to Molly to check how she is results in us going to pick her up on our way to Glen Orchy Falls. It’s glorious here and because the river is not in spate we can get closer to the falls and feel their power.

After lingering a while we are heading back to the caravan. Katie is cooking tonight so we are looking forward to some tacos. After a delicious dinner and a great day out and about in beautiful Argyll we are all tired, so after a bit of a chat everyone heads for bed at around 9pm.

It’s Monday morning and we are wondering what the week will bring. Lorne has messaged to say he’ll be a bit late because he has to pick up a hand operated compactor. This gives us an extra wee while to hang out with our viitors before they leave.

Lorne has arriveds so we plan the day, Molly and Pete are to check the position of the pipes and Lorne started back filling the French drain down the eastern boundary of the plot then the trenches for the pipes we have been working on.

Now that all the pipes have been check again Lorne uses the compactor to compress the stones that will support the foundation slab.

Our next task is to create a bed 50mm deep of pea gravel that is perfectly level for the Iso quick to sit on. This is a precise operation that involves laying screed poles, long steel tubes, at exactly the correct level then dragging a long piece of wood in a sawing motion across the gravel to make it lie level and flat but first we need all hands on deck to shovel tonnes of the gravel onto the area we are working on.

We’ve been at the screeding and are running out of gravel and now it starts raining so we agree to finish this section and call it a day.

Andrew is back from his holidays and will come to the site tomorrow to check on progress and help us plan the way forward.

It’s Tuesday morning and it’s still raining. We have been very lucky up until now because it has been dry and that has allowed the ground works to make fast progress and not get bogged down in mud. With most of the digging already done the rain shouldn’t hold us back much today.

Lorne arrives with a trailer load of pea gravel so that we can finish the gravel bed for the Isoquick. We get right to it and have it done just as Andrew arrives.

After a quick catch up we agree to start laying out the Isoquick but before we start joining them together we have to check the plans Isoquick have provided. Andrew checks the positions of all the pipes and discovers, despite all our best efforts, that only a few of them meet the standard of positioning required. Andrew is calculating what we need to do then we get down to fixing our mistakes. Luckily for us we don’t have to dig them up and start again but some repositioning and a few bends here and there and we ae goood to go.

It doesn’t take the four of us long to make some real progress and we have the perimeter built in not much more thn an hour.

With the perimeter in place and the rain finally stopped we start filling in with two interlocking layers of the high density polystyrene cutting out wehere the pipes pop up through the insulation layer and concrete.

We are amazed and delighted that, through a great piece of team work, we have managed to build the Isoquick foundation insulation by the end of the day.

A huge thanks to Andrew for his guruness and to Lorne for his tireless efforts on our behalf. We have no doubt that it is because of Lorne’s energy and dedication to our project that we have made such rapid progress. We couldn’t have hoped for a better person to work with.