Week Ninety-three

Week beginning 11th March 2024.

It’s almost half way through March already and the days are stretching, giving us a bit more time to work if we need it.

It’s a nice day so we are aiming to fit the reveals around the main door and the mega-shed door. We need to do a bit of work preparing the area around the main door so that we can get as good a fit as possible. One of the challenges about having most of the insulation on the outside of the building is finding strong fixing points for the reveals.

The depth of the reveals is not a standard width so we are ripping, cutting length wise, 150mm wide boards to fit. The board above the door is fitted first, with Compriband creating a seal between the board and the door frame.

With that in place, we now have to prepare a board for the left-hand side cutting it to width, length and a notch so that it sits on the paving and over into the trough. This time we not only run Compriband between the board and the door frame but also at the bottom of the board where it meets the paving. Now we repeat the process for the right-hand reveal.

Happy with how the main door reveals have gone we are now moving on to the mega-shed door. We need to do quite a bit more preparation here because we didn’t fully understand what was required when we originally battened the building. We have already been through this for the windows on the mega-shed so we have some solutions to draw on.

With some additional timbers in place we now have good fixing points for the reveals. We now just repeat the same process as with the main door reveals.

With both doors fitted with their reveals, and although we are still really tired, we are fitting a few cladding boards to the south of the main door.

That’s it for today and we are very happy with our progress, it won’t take too much more work to finish the cladding on the house and the west elevation of the mega-shed.

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Pete is off to Edinburgh for work today and is on the final push before the end of March when his contract finishes. He has a lot to do and has many miles driving under his belt because he is working with people in Irvine, Perth and Edinburgh.

Molly is off to Pickleball and is expecting her sister Ishbel later, who has offered to do a bit of work with her.

Molly and Ishbel are working on finishing the last bits of cladding around the main door. It is very generous of Ishbel to come and work because it is her seventieth birthday today.

One of the notable things that has become obvious is that, given a chance, a lot of our family and friends, regardless of age, mobility, gender or experience are enthusiastic to get involved and learn how to use power tools and work hard to help us build our house. This certainly flies in the face of social stereotyping and is quite inspiring.

Pete has arrived home just in time to catch Ishbel before she heads home. The cladding around the main door is almost finished with just a few boards still to be fixed above the door. It’s looking great! Thanks Ishbel, and happy birthday.

Molly is finishing the last few boards while Pete does a bit of office work.

That’s it, the cladding on the house is finally finished. We just need to finish the detailing inside the house and the electricians have a few wee jobs to finish there too.

Our friend Kathy is here for dinner and is enjoying seeing how we are getting on since she hasn’t been here since last summer. Kathy has a lot of specialist knowledge about traditional building techniques as she has been heavily involved in the repair of the buildings at Auchindrain Township.

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Pete is off to Irvine today. This morning Molly is doing a bit of gardening, moving daffodils away from areas that Kevin will work on with his digger in the next few weeks and clearing out some of the docks that seem to love our plot.

She is planning a trip to the dump in Oban, followed by some shopping, so it’s time to load the car. The car is full but there is still a lot of building waste lying around, most of it to do with the paving, so that will have to wait for another day.

Molly is back from Oban and feels she has the energy to do more work so she is tidying up and organising the paving waste so that it is ready for taking to the dump later. With that done she now sorts out the larch that is sitting in the house climatising but still cupping and twisting. Hopefully by creating more space between the boards will help.

An early night is in order as we have both been working hard and are starting to run on empty.

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It’s Thursday and Pete would normally be heading out but he is working from home today because his workshop in Perth has been cancelled.

Molly is doing a bit of work on the WIFIE website. Women In Focus In Edinburgh is a womens’ photography collective that Molly founded over twenty years ago in Edinburgh. She is still committed to the collective even though she lives so far away.

We’ve had lunch and Pete is back at his computer and Molly is in the mega-shed tidying the attic space and tidying wood off-cuts in the main area.

Pete’s finished work for the day and there is still time to head to the dump so we are quickly loading the car with more rubbish and heading off.

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It’s another Friday morning and we are expecting the timber delivery we have been waiting over a month for. Part of the order is the black plastic pipe we will use as the venting for the waste water drains, apparantly there is a problem with the supply chain.

We have barely finished breakfast and that is the delivery lorry with our timber and pipes. It’s John our usual delivery guy and he is happy to drop the load as close to the house as possible so we can get it inside quickly and easily. We have the finished timber for our door surrounds and skirting boards and some heavier timber for filling in the double doors in the mega-shed. It looks like a lot of 145mmx45mm planks so Pete is worried he has ordered too much.

We’ve finished moving everything indoors – the finished timber into the house and the construction timber into the meg-shed. it is clear we are going to have to cut them all down to size as they are taking up a lot of space as many of them are over 4m long.

We are cutting the construction timber in half and it is soon clear that we have ordered far too much so we’ll have to store some of it up in the rafters and use it to build a bike/garden shed later.

Luckily for us it is a lovely sunny day so we can cut the finishing timber outside on the patio. Now that we have the MVHR up and running we can’t saw or sand in the house unless we switch it off and wait a while afterwards to let the dust settle before switching on again. This will be a bit inconvernient when it comes to fitting the skirting, door surrounds and ballustrades but it will also be much better in the long run because our house won’t be so dusty and it will protect the MVHR.

We have referred to our building note book where we write all our measurements and plans down to see what sizes we need the finished wood to be. There are a lot of cuts to make but the wood will be much more managable for storing.

We’ve just had a visit form Simon our scaffolder who has come to see how we are getting on. It’s nice to see him and he has brought Gary with him who is interested in buying our caravan. We agree a price with Gary and as soon as it’s ready we’ll give him a call to come and collect it.

We’ve finished cutting all the finishing timber and stacked it around the house so it is not so much of a trip hazard for when Zadjil and Carolyn arrive to give us a hand later today. Molly is over in the mega-shed preparing the space for them to sleep in the attic, Pete is working out how to use the crates the paving came in as a wood store.

We are going to have forty winks now so that we have the energy to be sociable when they arrive, we are so tired these days that we need to start looking after ourselves a bit better.

It’s dark now and that’s them arriving so once they have settled in we’ll have dinner and a catch-up over a glass of wine or two.

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We are up and ready to work, it is still a reasonable time but a bit later than we normally start. We have decided to split into two teams – Molly and Carolyn are going to finish cladding around the mega-shed door and Zadjil and Pete are going to start constructing the timber frame to fill in the space where the double doors are.

But first, we are gathered outside the double doors discussing the best coarse of action. Should we have one new polycarboante window or two, and if we just have one should it be vertical or could it be horizontal. It has taken a while but we have come to the conclusion that one carefully positioned vertical window will be the best outcome.

Molly and Carolyn are working well as a team and are making good progress on the cladding. It is a bit awkward for them because the size of the area from the edge of the reveals to the next existing board means the best coarse of action is to make custom boards to fill the gap.

Meanwhile, Zadjil and Pete are measuring up the size of the frame they need to build and cutting the construction timbers on the chop saw. Zadjil is extremely precise when it comes to measuring and cutting so now thast they are fitting the frame they have built they are having to coax it into place with some gentle and sometimes not so gentle persuasion.

Molly and Carolyn are fitting the last piece of cladding around the door and it looks like they have done a really good job of it. With all that done we are ready for lunch.

We are now working together on the new bit of wall and window. Zadjil and Pete are cutting and nailing the OSB to the outside ready to add the waterproof membrane and Molly and Carolyn are measuring and cutting the insulation for when the OSB is fixed.

Before fitting the polycarbonate sheet, which we are using instead of glass, we need to paint the frame it is being fixed to, so while Molly and Carolyn are doing that, Zadjil and Pete are cutting the sheet to size. To give the paint time to dry a bit we are taking an afternoon tea break, something we don’t usually do but it is the weekend afterall.

It has been a really productive day – the west elevation of the mega-shed is now fully clad and the new wall and window are installed and almost finished on the outside. We are all pleased with the new window and a little surprised at how much extra light it brings into the mega-shed.

We are all ready for a nice fish pie and a few glasses of well earned wine.

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Zadjil and Carolyn will be heading home today but are keen to finish what we started yesterday and so have committed to working until lunchtime.

We split up into our teams again with Molly and Carolyn fitting the insulation and measuring up and cutting the OSB for the inside to cover up the insulation. Zadjil and Pete are taking off the polycarbonate from the existing windows and are ready to cut them to the new size but there is a bit of a block because both teams need to use the work table so a bit of patience is required.

With both teams in full flow again, Molly and Carolyn are fitting the OSB on the inside and Zadjil and Pete, having fitted the resized polycarbonate, are cutting OSB for below the windows. With that done they are now adding battens to the outside and painting them black ready for when we get round to cladding that elevation.

That’s it, Zadjil and Carolyn are heading off after working really hard to help us take another step towards completing our build. It’s great having such enthusiastic and hard working helpers to drive us forward when we are running out of steam. Thanks so much!