Week Twelve – Part Two

A gentler start to today as we are now on our own but we still have a few tasks to do to stay on top of things. Just as we were getting our act together a delivery of timber arrived and we have to make sure that it is unloaded sensibly to maximise the space we have. Luckily it is the same man that delivered all our materials for the groundworks and he is very friendly and helpful.

Now that the timber has been unloaded and the lorry has gone Pete realises he has made a rookie error. When unloading, he said he wanted the second palette of timber put on top of the first, thinking it would save space, but all the timber needed for Thursday is at the bottom of the stack. Arghhhh and dohhhhh!!!!! Now we have to restack the timber so we can access the timbers we need first.

Luckily it only takes us a short hour to remedy Pete’s mistake. Phew.

Our next task is to find the soil pipes and service ducts that are just beneath the surface of the concrete so we get out the plans and measuring tape to find them. Some are easy to find because the concrete cracks easily when hammered if it’s just a thin layer or sometiimes there is a hollow booming sound from the pipes below but others take quite a bit of bashing with a mash hammer (a heavy hammer used by stone masons, also known as a club hammer) to reveal themselves.

With that task done we sweep the slabs to make them look nice and so they are ready for tomorrow’s task.

It’s off to Oban now to get tarpaulins to protect the timber and a wee funnel we ordered to put oil in the generator before we can use it.

While in Oban we pop into Lidl to get some of their lovely freshly baked Portuguese custard tarts (Pastéis de nata), we can barely pass Lidl’s without popping in to get some of these so it’s just as well it’s a 50 mile round trip.

We have a bit of time before dinner so we potter around in our ‘garden’.

Today we start building up from the foundations and we are expecting Andrew, our guru, to arrive at around 9.30 but he arrives well before then. Our task today is to fit the sole plates. These are the timbers that are bolted to the concrete on which the frames we built in June are attached.

After our rather poor attempt at setting out the soil pipes and service ducts we are very pleased that Andrew is here to guide and support us. The sole plates have to be laid out very accurately and have to be level for the house. This is when we find out how good our concreting has gone.

As Andrew sets about fixing a base line to work from we have to bring timbers down to the slab and prepare them by stapling a damp proof course (DPC) on to the underside. This is to prevent rising damp and the timbers rotting. There is a point of view that says you don’t need this as the walls will be within the insulated house and not exposed to the outside world.

At first it was raining but we are lucky and the rain has stayed off most of the time which allows us to do all the sole plates for both buildings. It’s a noisy business with the generator running a lot of the time to power the hammer drill that drills through the concrete, the hammer drill itself and the impact drivers that fix the bolts. Luckily our neighbours are very understanding, so much so that Margaret, our neighbour to the north, lets us plug into her power supply to recharge our power tool batteries.

Andrew has been great explaining everything as we go along and with teamwork we get the job done by six. This is just as well as it has started raining again and as Andrew leaves we set about tidying up and covering our timber stacks with the tarpaulins we bought yesterday.

It has been a very exciting and rewarding day. We can now get even more of a clue as to what size our rooms will be. It’s a strange thing that at each stage we get a different idea about the size of the finished house – somethimes it feels big and other times small. Spacial perception is a strange thing.