Week Forty-four

Week beginning 3rd April 2023.

We are on our own again and it’s a lovely day. We are fitting the sill on the guest bedroom window before we fit the window reveals on both the bedroom windows. These are the last two windows on the house so once we’ve done them that’s that task completed.

It’s mid-day and our friends Karen and Martin have arrived for lunch on their way to Kilmartin. Pete hasn’t seen them for ages but Molly and Karen have been in the same book group for ages. There’s a lot of catching up to do once we’ve done the house tour.

They are heading off now and it’s been great having them visit, especially as Karen brought a banana cake that she has baked for us, delicious!

We are spending what’s left of the afternoon finishing off the window reveals.

It’s been a lovely day, a bit of a leisurely pace but given that we have been working hard for ten months, we think that’s allowed.

Another day, another dollar.

With the reveals done, today we have moved on to fitting a cladding detail. We are going to have vertical larch cladding and a horizontal board running across each of the gables, set at the height of the walls on the north and south elevations. This should look really good and will make the job of cladding the building a bit easier as we won’t have to make perfect vertical joins on the highest sections.

It has taken us a while to work out the position and angle of the horizontal board because we have to be sure that when it rains, the drips run in such a way so as to limit the chance of timber decay.

This afternoon we are boxing in where the soffits and fascias meet. The vertical piece needs to have it’s top edge cut at 45º to fit the gable soffit. Now we need to cut a triangular piece for below the fascia at the end of the soffits. It’s a bit tricky but we’ve done an alright job and hopefully it looks good from a distance.

We’ve had to interupt our detailing because the delivery of our Mechanical Ventilation and Heat Recovery system has arrived. Luckily the three palet loads aren’t heavy and we can carry them into the house easily. The actual ventilation unit is a bit too heavy to carry so we get our trusty old trolly out to ease the burden.

This trolly has been a great buy because it makes lifting heavy things really managable. We used it when we emptied our flat and put all our belongings into storage. It even goes up and down stairs because it has fairly big wheels.

With all the bits of the system in the house and the unit up on the mezzanine we can get back to what we were doing.

Two down and two to go.

This morning we are working out what the wall on the mezzanine will look like. We want to allow as much light as possible to come from the windows up at mezzanine level but at the same time make sure it’s safe and offers a bit of privacy for the odd occasion when someone might sleep up there.

We are mocking up walls with bits of polystyrene packaging and playing around with them to get an idea of the effect.

We’ve been playing around with this for a while but we now think we know what we want. The wall will be on two levels, the lower level allowing light to flood down to the main living area and the higher area giving a solid and strong framework.

We are researching the idea of infilling the level change with glass but aren’t yet settled on the idea. We could also have a railing and spindles.

We have measured and cut all the timber for the walls and are laying the east mezzanine wall out on the floor to make sure we have all the bits and they are the right size.

We’ve taken all the pieces onto the mezzanine and are nailing it all together here before standing it up and fixing it in place.

With that all done we are calling it a day and heading to Oban for a shop and a shower. Happy days!