Week Fifteen – Part Two

It’s Wednesday morning and after yesterday’s exciting and frantic activity we have decided a good tidy up is in order because there are lots of timber offcuts and general building mess around the build.

We have lots of bags of garden and building waste so we are thinking of going to the amenity dump near Oban and are loading the car, hopefully they’ll all fit. But we can’t go yet because we were told that the windows and doors could arrive today.

We have just had a call from the transport company telling us that the windows and doors will be delivered tomorrow so we have asked for a time frame because we need to organise someone with a telehandler to unload the heavy paletts from the lorry.

We decide to make a dash for the dump but it’s a bit tight because it’s 4.15 and the dump shuts at 5.

The road is slow with traffic but we are managing to stay calm and patient. Oban is 25 miles from us and we can usually make it in about half an hour. We reckon that even if we arrive at the last minute if we can get throught the gates we can unload and the job will be done.

It’s 4.55 and we are here but the gates are shut and there is a ‘Closed’ sign to make sure we understand. We’re none too happy with this turn of events but what can we do!

We’re on our way home with our consolation pastéis de nata (Portugues custard tart) from Lidl so we feel a bit reconciled. We had a phone call telling us that the lorry will arrive tomorrow between 8 and 10am so we have to get someone.

It’s 8.30 and we’ve had a stressful few hours trying to get through to someone who could help us but finally, Alistair our neighbours brother has agreed to come in the morning and unload the windows and doors. What a relief, Pete was seriously stressing out thinking the windows would have to stay on the lorry and go back to the depot. This would have been an irony because they have managed to get here all the way from Norway!

We are up sharpish this morning in case of the unlikely event that the windows arrive at 8. We start by getting out the tools and materials we might need for the day ahead as Scott and Ally arrive to set the trusses out accurately in line and level.

It’s 9am and there’s a call from the driver to check how to get to us. We call Alastair to let him know the lorry is arriving and before you know it the windows are being unloaded. It’s a bit nerve racking watching the widows being transported up our rough track but Alastair does a grand job and there are no breakages which is just as well because they are very expensive triple glazed super efficient windows and super insulated doors.

It’s worth pointing out here that part of the success of the build so far is that guru Andrew has anticipated the lead-in times for getting materials and products to site. The windows, insulation and cladding were all ordered and paid for months ago and we have been in contact with the solar panel and bettery company for many months.

Scott and Ally are doing a grand job and we are attaching more OSB to the rim beam that was fitted on Tuesday. We are so caught up in our work that we have forgotten to take as many photos as usual (sorry Scott and Ally).

We were slightly ahead of ourselvess on Monday and Tuesday by fitting the floor on the mezzanine before insulating between the rim beams. This means that Molly is now drilling holes in the rim beams under the floor in order to fill them with expanding foam. This is an expensive retrofix in both time and money. It would only have taken minutes to do before the floor was down with a few pounds worth of glass wool whereas now it will take a couple of hours and lots of cans of foam, which don’t come cheap.

Sometimes we can get over enthuisiastic and race ahead with the work when the appropriate thing to do would be to stop and think through the next few stages, ‘a stitch in time’ and all that.

We’re off to Oban this morning to unload our car full of recycling, garden and building waste and to do our weekly shop. We have to be efficient because we are expecting visitors for lunch!

Our visitors have arrived and we are happy to see Pete’s mum, Ursi, and our close family friend, Wendy. They have brought a picnic lunch which we will have after a tour of our new house and shed.

We love having visitors and Ursi and Wendy have made today a special one for us. It’s time for them to go and as they drive off we decide that we will take the rest of the day off and enjoy the good weather and the rest of the bottle of Prosecco.

Since we had such a nice time yesterday and didn’t do much work we’ve decided to work today, even though it’s Saturday. In our last couple of days in Andrew’s workshop we cut all the timber to make ourselves a work table for cutting sheets of OSB or ply and a bench for a chop saw for cutting lengths of timber such as the larch cladding. We are going to assemble these today so that the work coming up in the next few weeks will be easier.

As a point of interest, it is traditional to mark building to the full height of your structure with a topping out ceremony of some sort. On the day the trusses went up, what with all the stress and pressure, we didn’t do anything when the team were still here. It’s too late now to do anything about it, and we regret that, but we just want to apologise to the team and hope we can make it up at some time in the future.

Ursi told us that in Switzerland Pete’s grandad, who was a building site foreman, would put a fir tree on top of the building to mark the topping out and give his builders crates of beer to celebrate.