Week Sixteen – Part Two

It rained heavily last night, as expected, so we have decided not to work on the house today. Instead we are having a bit of a slow start while waiting for the delivery of our insulation.

We’re just pottering around when Pete gets a call from the driver checking he is on the right route. He’s here pretty quickly and is reversing his lorry up the track, ready for unloading.

Pete is telling Graeme that we don’t have much space so will have to pick our spots carefully. Graeme informs us that there will be another lorry load tomorrow. This comes as a bit of a shock to us because this one lorry load looks like a lot to us.

After a bit of a chat and planning Graeme carefully unloads and stacks the palettes very skillfully where we are asking him to.

It’s taken almost 90 minutes for Graeme to unload and distribute the insulation around our building site, keeping it usable, if a little packed.

We are on our way to Oban to take our fourth load of waste to the dump (about a third of the total has been garden waste rather than building waste, not bad), wash our clothes, collect supplies, do our weekly shop and most exciting of all, go for a sauna at Oban’s Atlantis Centre. We are in desperate need of a deep clean so a sauna is just perfect, it might even ease some of our aching muscles.

We are back from Oban feeling clean and relaxed, and the sun is shining. We have worked out how to put the missing sheet of OSB in the south facing roof of the house and feel up to the challenge so we are getting to it.

We are pleased with the day, not the usual working day but we still count it as working, apart from the sauna which was sheer pleasure.

Another slow start, we must be a bit too relaxed, and just as we are starting to get ready for the task of working out how to cut into the trusses for the Veluxs the second load of insulation turns up.

We already have a plan so we have a chat with Tom, today’s driver, before he sets to work. Before too long he’s done and gone and we are left with a sense of being crowded out. We certainly don’t have much of a view from the caravan now.

Ishbel, our neighbour from the farm next door, has come for a visit and we invite her in for coffee and a chat. Our neighbours are very friendly and understanding towards us, no less Ishbel who helped us by asking her son Iain to unload our Isoquick with the telehandler and has offered us use of her shower.

We are back trying to work out the best approach to cutting the trusses and reinforcing the structure in preparation for the Veluxs. It involves lots of head scratching and sketching out our thoughts.

Finally, after lots of research and YouTube watching, we have a plan but we need to pass it by Andrew to make sure we haven’t made any false assumptions or made any rookie errors. This means we can’t do anything about this until we see him.

We’ve had a call from our friends Anne and Robbie who are in the area and are coming over for a visit.

It’s been great to see them and Robbie is very generous in the way he encourages and supports us with his enthusiasm for the project. It is really important for us to have this kind of positive reaction to what we are trying to do, after all it is a bit barking!

It’s Friday night and it is Italian week at Lidl so we are in for a bit of an Italian themed treat this weekend. we have Panacotta al Caramelle, Cantuccini, a Tiramisu, Parmeggiono Regiano, Aperitivos and multi coloured Farfale pasta. Mmmmmm!!!!!

Even though it’s Saturday morning we are going to do a few hours to stay on top of our workload so we have decided to OSB the inside of the apex of the shed roof. This is not an easy task because the design of trusses means we have to cut notches into the OSB to make it fit and just to add complication, the trusses aren’t equally spaced.

It’s taken a few attempts to get it right but now that we’ve worked it out things are moving fairly quickly.

With that done we are off to Oban again but this time to meet up with Gordon and Sheena and to get an ice-cream. We are going to take the rest of the weekend off and have some fun and get some rest.