Week beginning 24th June 2024.
It has been a fun week with Nicky and Graham and the weather has been mostly kind. It has given us a chance to have a more restful time, away from finishing the house.
On Monday we took a wee trip to Luing, one of the slate isles off the west coast of Argyll.
On Tuesday a walk from Inverawe to Taynuilt and a visit to the shops there.
In the afternoon Nicky, Graham and Molly built two raised beds for our garden at the back of the house while Pete did some weeding in the front garden.
Wednesday was another nice day so we headed into the hills for a walk, then round to The Old Garden Nursery in Taynuilt and in the evening we watched England v Slovenia.
During breaks in the rain on Thursday we levelled the ground and set-up the raised beds, partially filling them with stones and sand to ensure good drainage. A quick trip to the garden centre to pick up some top soil and compost gives us all we need to finish the beds off.
It has been lovely to have Nicky and Graham visit for the week and give us help in assembling and setting-up our raised beds. We are looking forward to starting a new adventure in creating a garden to complement our new home. Thanks Nicky and Graham.
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It’s Friday morning and we have just dropped Nicky and Graham off at the bus stop. We need to get back and be ready for our final air-tightness test later today.
While we are waiting we are mixing our top soil, compost and sand and starting to fill the beds.
The guys have arrived a bit earleir than we expected so we have to quickly get ourselves organised. We had erected the scaffolding tower yesterday, with Nicky’s help, so now we need to get up there and take the cover off the ventilation vents so that the guys can tape them up ready for the test.
After a bit of pre test work the guys get down to the final test which takes about 30 minutes. Our final score is 1.7 which is worse than the previous test which came in at 1.4. We couldn’t find any signisficant leaks to tape up so we are going to have to acept this as our final score. We would have liked a better score but it is still very good and means our house can work as it is designed to, very insulated, airtight and energy efficient.
We are spending the rest of the day filling the raised beds and doing a bit of tidying wioth a view to taking the weekend off.
We have had a lovely relaxing and fun week with Nicky and Graham and have even made a little progress towards completing the house. Happy days!
That was such a great week with you both and your blog captures this wonderfully! Your self building is such a fantastic achievement 👏. Now you have got the pressure test result done, while it might be slightly higher than you hoped for, another milestone done too🥂
Thank you for helping with putting all these bits together for the raised beds and they look great in what will be our garden area. Mx
Thanks for hosting us, we had a splendid time. Grants the butcher at Taynult was a great find and Nicky cooked the steak perfectly.
It was really nice having you here for a few days and getting out to explore a bit. A nice balance of a wee bit work and plenty of rest. Mx
A wonderful blog! Congratulations. Great to see that you can also get some relaxation now. I am so proud of you both and your achievement. Well done!
Thank you Ursula. Your continued support has been great. Mx