The Donated House

Since the roof is the best place from which to put up the wall between the annex and main house, we decided to hurry up and do that. It has radically changed the view from the attic.

The step is just so we can still get in and out.

It was quite exciting to see the shape of the windows, even if the windows themselves are still a distant dream.

CJ has increased in confidence about both roof-climbing and massive nail gun use.

And I managed to source some larch cladding locally, which will hopefully cover this bit and both gable ends. I’m really pleased with the way it looks. It will go grey eventually, but for now it’s the most beautiful red-brown.

In other news, a bunch of our friends went to The Forbidden Corner, tucked away in darkest North Yorkshire. It’s like an amusement park, but one where, instead of having any rides, they just concentrated on making the inbetween atmospheric decorative bits AMAZING. So everything’s built of real stone, not moulded plastic, and all the gardens and plants are real, not plastic, doors are made of wood and metalwork and look properly old, the whole thing was awesome. It’s like a giant maze of interesting little places and it’s pleasingly unclear how you get from one place to another, so you just have to wander around and find stuff. Highly, highly, highly recommended. Maybe go off-season, though. Too many people there for it to have been quite perfect.

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Not exactly finished, I admit that. But one side of one bit finished. About 2/5 finished. Allow me my moment of rejoicing. Here, David poses with his (and it was largely his) triumphant roof. I think it looks rather well.

We got electricity in the house, complete with a light.

But the big news is the progress on the exterior walls. Dani came round for the first time, hopefully, of many and was very helpful and enthusiastic, even though she had only meant to come for dinner and ended up staying the night and working most of the next day.

Below, Lea and Mac prepare the wall for receiving render. The actual use of the hedge trimmer doesn’t seem to have been documented, sadly, but I can say that Lea definitely had the talent for it, leaving the walls lovely and unfluffy.

It was a bit of a moment of truth when we tipped off the water and started to use the first of the lime putty (slaked back in February). I was worried about the consistency, as I didn’t really know what I was doing when I slaked it. And it is a bit thin…

But you work with what you’ve got. Two blops of putty…

…to six blops of sand…

…mixed up into a thick paste that just about held its form and was easy to spread on the walls and work into the straw’s texture. Peter and Lea were very quick learners, and did a great job, so we got through most of the ground floor exterior walls (barring the back wall, which I’m not doing until I’ve sorted out this bloody damp problem.)

I think I remember the stuff I used before being thicker, but hey, we’ll make it work. I expect I will put it on in very thin layers and let it fully cure for ages between coats, in the hopes that that will make up for it being a bit thin. In places, it’s already drying to a lovely creamy colour.

Among the three of us, we’ve got a lot of roofing done in a the last few days. I reckon we’re one day off finishing that side of the main house.

The windows are a faff and really slow you down, but we’re faster at them now than we were at the beginning and when the teamwork is flowing, it’s not a bad job. Bit like a jigsaw puzzle that you get to custom-cut the pieces for.

David and Mackenzie are great to work with.

And the view out of the windows is very satisfying.

Meanwhile, my Montmorency cherry tree is producing the best crop so far, which is still pretty small; a long way off a pie, and some of them have gone dry and scabby. The Albalu cherry next to it is doing better in terms of size and quality of fruit but there’s less on it overall. I wish I knew what to do to encourage them. Any tree-fruit experts out there?

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When David stays over, he brings his hammock to hang in the house. Over a gaping hole with a 3 metre drop to a concrete floor. No telling with some people.

To be fair, I think he only did that once for the experience and from now on will hang it somewhere more sensible.

We have been playing a fair bit of Robo Rally in the evenings, since (discounting the midges) it’s really been pleasant outdoors in the evenings.

But we’ve also been cracking on with the roofing and stuff.

Antony helped me carry the granite countertop that came with the kitchen he’d ripped out of the neighbours house, which they kindly passed on to me. Very posh, but bloody difficult to move.

And Andy donated a square of roofing lead for the bit where the ridge meets the slope of the roof. David, luckily, knew what to do with it.

While I made some half-assed calculations, ran a string line and decided that *this* was the right place to put all the tiles up the valley.

It has since come to my attention that I was wrong by about 1-2 cm per tile, which has necessitated a whole lot of custom cutting, the last of which I have just done. Sigh.

But with a decent size team here, David reckons we can get most of the rest of this side of the main roof done this weekend. I think that is a bit optimistic, but I’m not going to try to dissuade him.

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Since a lot of people have asked (which is lovely because it implies a lot of people are paying attention) I’ll give you the good news about the wall that got flooded a few weeks ago. Rae came round and said it was likely that it would dry out. I was skeptical, but then there was very little that would convince me to pull out the wall if I thought there was any chance it would dry out, so I left it, making sure it was not going to happen again, and it seems, for all I can tell, that it has actually dried out quite quickly. I’m flabbergasted, actually.

However, there’s also the story of the blotchy floor, which was looking slightly damp-from-below every time it rained. I thought it might just be drying out slowly from its original pouring, and then I thought it must be the mulchy mush of old sawdust that had sort of gathered behind the house holding moisture and letting it soak into the slab. I felt a bit bad about that because I should have shovelled the mush away months ago, really, but I’ve just been a bit overwrought and not terribly on top of everything. Anyway, I asked Alec to do that, but the blotchy floor still continued.

I feel so unbelievably stupid and irresponsible now that I realise it was actually the fairly continuous backsplash from the roof runoff onto the wall back there, which ran, every time it rained, through the bale, down through the drainage stuff at the bottom of the wall and into the floor. I thought maybe backsplash would be happening but I didn’t think it would be as bad as it turned out to be. I finally sorted it out, sticking some tarps up between the splash and the wall, but leaving a foot or two of breathing space, and I hope it will dry out. This lot is much worse than the flooded wall turned out. That didn’t even smell of rot, whereas this does. I hope that because it’s surface wetness and Barb said that doesn’t usually penetrate too deep, and because it’s not a load-bearing wall, that it will be ok. I will let it dry for the rest of the summer, making sure it doesn’t get wet again, and hope for the best. That’s pretty much all I can cope with.

Psychological exhaustion doesn’t make for the best building management, really.