Week beginning 11th December 2023.
It’s another Monday morning and our aim today is to get some small but important tasks completed. To start with we are refitting the balcony door lock barrel so that the key turns to lock the door. When Pete fitted it he didn’t realise that the lock had to be in the open position when fitting the barrel. It’s a wee bit fiddly and we are making sure all the spacers are in the right order but it still takes us several attempts before it’s all working as it should be.
Although cold it’s dry just now so we are reorganising our larch cladding stacks because it’s all got a bit chaotic and we seem to be going round in circles looking for nice straight bits. We are taking all the boards off the pallet so we can move it further back so as to take up less space. Now we are stacking the bent boards at the back of the pallet and the unchecked ones at the front.
All three stacks, the 150mm, the 200mm and the 75mm, are neat and tidy and not taking up nearly as much space and it should be a bit easier once we get a chance to do more cladding.
We are now going to order materials for finishing the house but first we need to go round the house measuring so we know how many meters of picture hanging system to buy, how long the hand rail on the straight stair needs to be and how many spindles for the mezzanine ballustrades. We also need to order a cooker hood in time for the electricians to fit it.
We have just finished loading the car with off-cuts of OSB for recycling and a few bags of rubbish for the dump. We also need to return a few unused bits to the kitchen company and buy some battens to finish preparing the mega-shed for cladding so we are off to Oban again.
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Pete is workiong today and will be heading out with a colleague this afternoon.
Molly is painting blackboard paint onto the tape on the double trusses so that we can fix the trims that will hide the taping.
This afternoon, rather than wasting the left over wood fibre insulation by taking it to the dump, Molly is using it as a mulch around the base of the hawthorns and other trees we planted to keep down the other plants and give the sasplings a better chance of growing.
Molly is in the shed getting more order now that we have finished insulating and sheeting it up.
Pete is back from work to find some fairy lights brightening up the balcony and the area behind the mega-shed, Molly has been adding some festive cheer.
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Pete is working again today but will be able to finish a bit earlier than usual because he worked a few extra hours yesterday.
The weather is dry today so Molly is looking out good bits of cladding to fix to the west elevation. They have to be chosen fairly carefully because they have to be the same width as the ones above on the gable. Although the cladding is meant to be cut to 75mm, 150mm and 200mm widths, the sawmill has a fair bit of tolerance so the wider ones can sometimes be up to 5mm narrower so she has to check they will look alright once fixed.
Molly has prepared some boards and Pete is now able to join her and we are now fixing them to the wall taking care to line them up as best we can.
We’ve managed to get another two meters of cladding done but now it is getting too dark and we are having to call it a day. We’re well pleased with what we have achieved in just s couple of hours and we only have a little over a meter to do before this elevation is finished. Definitely getting there!
Our neighbour Steve is round fo dinner but has to leave at around eight because we are having a video call with our good friends Nicky and Graham , our sadly neglected walking buddies. We’ve just been so obsessed with the build that we haven’t been making time for walks but that’ll change once the house is finished and we can, all four of us, head to the hills together once again.
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It’s Thursday, Pete’s last day before he breaks up for Christmas, and he’s away all day so Molly is on her own today. She is going to the Christmas lunch in the community centre this afternoon but in the meantime it is the important task of Christmas card writing.
Molly has been back from the lunch for a while now and Pete is getting back from his work trip a bit later than usual. It is getting so dark so early these days that the best thing to do is settle down to some tv and get an early night.
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Friday again and Pete is free to get on with the build so the first task today is to do the final tweaks to the kitchen, making sure all the drawers are nicely lined up and level and everything is working as it should be.
While Pete is working on the kitchen Molly is removing the masking tape around the inside of the front door and giving it a good clean to get the splatters of plaster off. It looks much better now.
We are in the mega-shed ripping thin strips of pine from a 45mmx145mm timber to use as a trim for the double trusses. It’s a messy and tricky job, particularly because the timber is a bit twisted so it isn’t always easy, or possible, to get a perfect rip.
We are up on the east mezzanine with four long lengths of trim and are measuring up and fixing them over the tape on the double trusses with wood glue and tiny panel pins. It’s a bit fiddly because the pins are so small so it is taking a bit of time but it is worth it because it finishes them off very nicely.
We are finishing for the day because it’s getting too dark to do this accurately, even with the work lights, and we haven’t quite achieved as much as we’d hoped.
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It’s Saturday and we will be heading off to visit Molly’s sister Ishbel in her new house, an hour north of here but first some work.
We are ripping some more strips of trim to have a go at finishing what we started yesterday.
We’ve done a few more bits but we have to stop because Craig, who is going to lay our slabs, has arrived to measure out more accurately what we want and so we can calculate how many slabs to buy. We have the original drawing from our planning application to work from so we are out in the rain with our tape measure. It looks like we are going to need about 50m2 of slabs and the ones we want are expensive, maybe too expensive. Pete has found a supplier that is a good bit cheaper than our first quote but we still have to find out if they can deliver and unload them for us with a truck with a crane. Nothing is ever simple!
Craig has gone and left us with questions to ask the supplier so we don’t get caught out on the delivery and we are fitting a couple more trims before heading off to Ishbel’s.
It’s been a bitty week but we have still made inroads and it can’t always be dramatic progress when you are building a house, there are a lot of small details to deal with too.
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We had a very relaxed evening and sleep over at Ishbel’s, lots of chat and good food and of course, wine. Her new house is lovely and finished to a very high standard so we are quite impressed. It’s lovely up there, beyond Appin, but it was so wet on the way home we almost didn’t get through one bit of very flooded road. Is this what global warming is bringing to Scotland!
