Week Fifty-six

Week beginning 26th June 2023.

We woke to pouring rain on Sunday morning and decided that we should start battening the east mezzanine gable. It was a bit tricky because we had to cut the tops of the battens at an angle and leave a gap allowing for the edge batten and for the ceiling plasterboard.

This is neccessary because where the roof/ceiling meets the gable there is no truss to fix to so the plasterboarders will need to get in to fix screws to the ceiling plasterboard. Once they have fixed this board we can add the end batten to the gable wall.

It took a few hours to get the wall battened after which we spent some time working out how to box in the ducting and ventilation manifolds on the west mezzanine. We have decided to box in from the mezzanine wall, on the left of the photo, to just before the end of the second manifold, on the right, leaving the large steel ducts visible.

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It’s Monday morning, 8.30am, and Des the plumber has arrived to get on with the first fix plumbing. He has the shower enclosure for the guest shower room with him and says we should give him our order for all the sanitary ware, taps and shower mixers so that he can order them. Luckily we have already done our research but we are going to go through it again.

Today’s task is to batten the west mezzanine gable, a tricky task because the ventilation unit is on that wall and we will need to work around it and we need to leave the same gap as on the other gable wall.

The battening from the north side of the gable and beyond the window is going on easily but now we are working around the ventilation unit and it’s a tight fit.

While we have been doing this Des has been getting on with fitting the copper pipes. He tells us that we will need to have the heat battery for our hot water on the east mezzanine, above the guest shower room. It’s a bit disappointing because we wanted it in the boot room but the technical requirements of fitting it means that there isn’t enough space there.

We’ve talked it through and are reconciled to the change in where it will be housed. We’ll lose a bit of space under the eaves but it doesn’t encroach into the usable floor space so it’s not that bad.

We are going through our list of shower room fittings and are making some changes because we are noticing some better options.

One of the decisions we have made is to not have tiles, choosing panels instead. Our rational is that tiles use a lot of energy to produce, fuel to transport and need more cleaning and maintenance than the water proof panels.

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This morning we are surveying the inside of our house to make a list of what still needs done to finish the battening. There are some areas that are a bit more complicated because of the way the walls meet the stairs in tricky corners.

We have quite a list of things still to do, just when we were congratulating ourselves on being pretty much done with the battening. It shows how important it is to stop and think through what we are doing.

With that done we can move on to checking where we want all the power sockets, switches, lights, towel rails, radiators, heat battery and ventilation system power points to be.

Although we have already been through this process before it is still taking quite a while to go round the house thinking through what would be best.

We have just spent ages on the internet looking at light fittings, trying to make our choices work as a coordinated scheme. There is so much to choose from but that makes it more difficult rather than easier. It is also difficult to find affordable good quality lights in designs that we can agree on. Luckily we have much the same taste so we aren’t conflicted in the process of choosing.

We now have a list of lighting fittings and have chosen an infra red heating panel that can fit under the roof window in the kitchen area. It feels good to have dealt with this and brings us closer to realising the style of the inside of our home.

We are heading off to Edinburgh tomorrow to collect our new electric car and to celebrate Pete’s birthday. We’ll be bringing back our son and grandchildren for a wee holiday when we return.

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It’s Friday and we are back at Gar Bothan. We had a lovely time in Edinburgh celebrating Pete’s birthday, we went to Maki & Ramen for lunch with Eddie, Niven and Caitlin after we had been to see the Peter Howson exhibition. His work is very powerful and affecting but some of it the children avoided as it isn’t at all appropriate for them, they wouldn’t know how to understand it and deal with it emotionally.

On Thursday evening we went to Pete’s mum, Ursi, for dinner and had a lovely time there with Mikey, his brother, and Eddie, mum’s partner.

On Friday Molly picked up our friend Martin who is coming to help with the build and Pete picked up Eddie, Niven and Caitlin in our new car.

Pete had mild range anxiety about the new car but it made it all the way home using about 40% of it’s battery capacity. We are quite happy about this because the car was quite full of people and luggage and managed the trip easily. We don’t have a dedicated charging point yet so we will have to plug it in with a standard three pin plug for now meaning it will take over a day to charge from 0% to 100% but we won’t let it go down that far or charge it much beyond 80% anyhow.

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It’s Saturday morning and it’s pouring here, nonetheless Molly, Eddie, Niven and Caitlin are heading out for a wee ‘road trip’ as caitlin calls it. Pete and Martin are going to start tackling the snagging list.

Pete and Martin are getting down to tackling the list but as ever it takes a while to get into the swing of it. It hasn’t taken them long to tick off quite a number of tasks on the list but they have to stop now because they have run out of the right kind of timber.

With that done they are moving on to tackling the double trusses. These trusses need taping up for air tightness, an integral part of the design of the house that helps keep heating loss to a minimum. Obviously the tape isn’t a good look so they are going to cut very thin strips of timber from long lengths of 145mm x 45mm timber to fix over the tape and hopefully make it look as though it were the original timber, at least from a distance.

First they are sanding the surface of the timber to get down to nice clean raw timber that will more closely match the trusses and now they are using the circular saw, with the cutting guide set to 3mm, to cut carefully along the length of the timber. The first pass is a test and can’t be used because the timber comes with a slight bevel but it is helpfull to check that Pete and Molly’s solution to the issue will work. It works!

Another thin strip is cut and Martin is fitting it on the double truss above the roof window with some glue and tiny panel pins, it looks great and although time consumming isn’t too challenging.

Pete and Martin have fitted two strips to one of the sections between the wall head and the rafter and the gap is quite large, this is because the 145mm x 45mm timber drying out and the 45mm is now 42mm, resulting in the tape unserneath being quite obvious because of the text on it and some of the tape used is shiny. The solution is to use blackboard paint on the tape before fixing any more strips to the trusses which will help create the illusion of a gap between the trusses.

Thanks to Martin for working on the snagging list and for coming up with some solutions to the battening and how to fix the strips of timber on the double trusses, and make them look good.

Just as Pete and Martin are ready to finish and clean and tidy up the others arrive back from their day out. They have had a nice time first visiting Clachan Bridge, the ‘bridge over the Atlantic’, then over to Luing on the ferry.

Luing is one of the slate islands which offers beautiful landscapes, influenced by human industry.

So all in all, we have all had a productive, nice day and for the day trippers the weather held out even though it was torrential at Gar Bothan. Now it’s time to order some pizzas and share our day’s experiences.

On Tuesday Pete’s back to work for three days a week so things will be very different from now on.