Week Ninety

Week beginning 19th February 2024.

We are up bright and early to drive to Scottish Wood, near Dunfermline, to collect our special order of kiln dried, dressed larch. This is the timber we are going to use for finishing the tops of the ballustrades and return stair wall.

We’ve had a good run down and it has been mostly dry so with any luck the return journey will be the same. The Scottish Wood shop has a wide range of really nice timber in all sorts of shapes and sizes which anyone who has the skills to make their own furniture would love.

A telehandler has brought our order and it’s looking great. We are wrapping the long and short planks in seperate tarpaulings and taping them up with duck tape. Now we can tie them securely to our roof rack.

We have stopped at Stirling to buy some thin timber strips and to go to one of the supermarkets before heading back to Gar Bothan.

We are back and it stayed dry until we were almost home so it is a good thing that we protected the timber. We’ve brought it into the house to acclimatise before fitting.

We have time to do a couple of wee jobs before dinner so we are going to fix one of the heated towel rails to the wall in our en-suite and use the strip wood we bought to protect the plaster and create a platform for the pallet wood that will sit on top. It doesn’t take too long to do the two jobs once we worked out the measurements.

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It’s Tuesday and we are sticking with the new routine, Pete is working and Molly is off to Pickleball this morning and shoppiong in Oban in the afternoon.

We are fitting the other heated towel rail in the guest shower room but this time it really doesn’t take long at all. A little bit of experience goes a long way.

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Pete is off to Irvine for work and Molly is going to visit her cousin Catriona this morning.

Molly is finishing off glazing the plaster on the reveals around the French doors, the two bedroom windows, the boot room window and the nooks. It’s important that we don’t forget all these wee jobs that never quite got finished.

Des has arrived to drop off a replacement toilet for the en-suite because he had noticed a wee crack on the base of the one he had fitted. He says he’ll return on Friday to swap them and to check the seals and heating elements on the heated towel rails.

With Des gone, Molly is cutting a mitre into the pallet wood that we will use to make lids for the storage areas under the eaves on the west gable. With a mitred end, the planks can slip neatly under the eaves. We cut and dried quite a bit of pallet wood early on in the build for this kind of use.

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It’s Thursday and Molly is going to tackle an unfinished bit of plastering under the eaves beside the heat battery on the east mezzanine. We can’t remember why this bit never got plastered but it looks bad beside all the finished plaster around it. We have come up with a way of finishing it without having to try and plaster it to the same quality as Jef’s work, an unlikely outcome.

We have some of the 3.6mm plywood left over from lining the nooks and Molly is going to fix that to the area and paint it to match the finished plaster around the area. Molly is having to plane and sand one edge and taper the other edge so that the ply can sit nicely on the metal edging bead fixed there for the plastering.

With the ply fixed in place Molly is painting it to match, it is looking really good and is almost indistinguishable from the plastered walls all around.

Molly is cutting mitred ends into more pallet wood for fitting on top of the boxed in areas on the west mezzanine. She is onto another job now, painting some battens with black wood preservative ready to be fitted around the high window in the south gable of the mega-shed.

Pete’s back from his work trip to Perth and has time to work on the trims for the splashbacks for behind the basins in the shower rooms. He has tried cutting them to get a neat finish but it is proving too difficult so he has found that he can fit the top trim over the side ones and that gives a good neat finish and is much easier to do.

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We can work together today so we are carrying on with cutting mitres into the pallet wood for the mezzanines. Des is here to swap the toilet in the en-suite and finish the heated towel rails.

Craig has turned up just as we are having our morning coffee with Des. Craig is getting back into laying the paving slabs and Des has headed off having now finished all the plumbing in our house. We are really lucky to have been able to get Des to do all our plumbing work. He does really high quality work and is very neat and tidy. Thanks Des.

The rain has stopped so we are fixing cladding boards where the other downpipe on the mega-shed is to go. We’ve got the first board up and it has started raining again but we are keeping going since we have prepared the boards already. It is a bit unpleasant working in the rain but sometimes it’s better to just get a job finished rather than put it off for another day.

Craig is making great progress and, like Des, does very neat, good quality work.

It’s early afternoon and we are heading to Edinburgh. Zadjil and Carolyn very generously gifted us a night out at Six By Nico for a Funfair themed taster menu with matching wine.

It’s been a great night out with Zadjil and Carolyn at Six by Nico. The food was really great full of theatre, fun and amazing flavour. We all loved it, Pete’s stand out course was the Spinning Teacups, Mushroom Veloute, Truffled Foam, Comté “Toastie”, the most intense mushroom flavour ever. Molly and Carolyn’s standout dish was Win-a-Goldfish, Coley, Golden Pumpkin, Laksa “Arancini”, Seaweed Crackers & Lemon Gel, a beautiful combination of flavour and presentation. Zadjil’s was Toffee Apple, Candy Apple Mousseline, Pedro Ximenez Sherry, Sweet & Sour Quince and the excellent pairing of the wine which was a perfect match. All-in-all we had a great time.

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It’s almost ten on Saturday night and we have just arrived back from our trip to Edinburgh.

This morning we took Niven and Caitlin for a swim in Portobello swim centre, where we took them from the time they were babies and holds many happy memories for us. Then lunch with them and their parents was a delight.

After a trip to Ikea we had dinner with Pete’s mum and Eddie H, then headed home.

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Sunday provides us with glorious weather ,that was forecast, and we are up and ready not too late to start cladding the south wall of the shed. Pete notices that we we are running out of the nails that we use to fix the cladding to the battens so we may not get as much done as we hope. We select and carry down the planks we need and, as is often the case, we find that we need to do some extra bits of work in preparation. We add some extra battens running parallel to the eaves under the roof and undo the outside water tap.

We are really enjoying working away outside measuring, cutting and fixing the cladding. We stop for a bit to watch the buzzards and eagles and then head indoors for a simple lunch of bread and cheese.

We are now making good progress with the cladding, fixing the lengths we need under the drip detail that we had previously added to this side of the building. We have now run out of the nails as we had anticipated but we have managed to do a good stretch along the wall towards the east side, ending fairly close to the middle and just below the window above.

With a slightly early finish we are now going to have a short siesta to re-charge ourselves ready for another week of building Gar Bothan.