The Donated House

Partly that’s because I haven’t (as usual) got much headspace to blog, and partly it’s because there’s actually quite a lot of progress being made and that takes of a lot of my time. Which is obviously nice.

It’s weird; sometimes lately I feel quite on top of it and competent. I think it’s partly to do with the fact that a lot of the time lately, I’m the most highly knowledgeable and competent person on site, which has not always been the case. And sometimes when someone else has the Boss Hat on, it’s lovely and freeing because I am not the one under pressure. But also I am not the one in control, which makes the whole endeavour much more terrifying.

Being the one in control makes it less scary but more exhausting. Can’t win. Or maybe can’t lose. Whatever. Anyway: House.

We have finally got the rest of the felt on the roof. And the big black tarp off. Briefly. Now it’s been re-used to tarp the sides, since they can’t be as exposed as that until they’re rendered, but anyway, we took a picture while it looked like a house not a tent.

I admit that a lot of the time the last few days has gone on games of zombie apocalypse and robot wars. But only after the work has been done. Except today, when it rained all day and I can’t be going on the roof in the rain, now can I?

Yesterday, however, was lovely and we worked like stink, and then had a lovely fire and sausages. I do love summer when it’s actually summer.

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A new volunteer, Gina, came at the weekend and David showed her the ropes of roofing.

We polished off one more section and then moved on to slaking the last of the quicklime.

Andy’s spinny tool came in handy but a lot of it still had do be done with hoes.

I’m glad to see the last of that job. I hope we will have made enough to render the whole building. I wish I’d finished earlier, because this lot will be ripe about October and that’s getting a bit late to be rendering, really. Still, there’s a fair amount ready now and hopefully enough to get the whole place rendered without having to dip into the latest stuff til quite late in the process.

And it’s bilberry season.

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I am very glad to be having help to do all this.

David is such a lovely co-builder.

We got all the roof trusses up last week, before I went on holiday.

It’s looking almost like a building rather than a build site.

And we’ve got nearly halfway across the front with the roof tiles. Positive positive positive.

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Well, a colossal thunderstorm hit Todmorden just as I was arriving home yesterday. About 15 minutes of the most intense rainfall I have ever seen in this country. So when I arrived home I went out to see whether it had dripped overmuch in the house. There was a bit of the roofing underlay that had managed to flap in the wind such that it had inverted itself and instead of directing water off the roof, it was funneling it straight into the building. And do you think this very unfortunate thing happened above a bit of floor? A bit of void? No. Over a bit of wall, or course. So a whole section of wall is totally sponge-style-soaked. Absolutely irretrievable. It’ll have to come out. And we’d already inserted all the fiddly bits of ring beam above it (which neatly funneled the water into the straw through a gap in the OSB) and they’ll have to be pretty much destroyed in order to get at the straw that needs replacing.

But nobody died. So that’s good.

It’s been what’s commonly called “nice weather” which is what people who find themselves on a south facing 45 degree roof call “way too f**king hot”, which makes the roofers on site all the more heroic for doing any roofing.

Alec’s job, done admirably, was to cut tiles to fit.

Here’s some vertigo to give you an idea of what it’s like perching on a steep roof:

And here’s what it looks like from a distance. Getting there.

Meanwhile, the bees were threatening to swarm, so we did a controlled swarm and now have three hives of bees. Not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But we can always reintegrate two of them. When we’d done it, we got out the new bee book and sat down to read about whether we’d done it right.

A couple of days ago I came home to find two rather beautiful, mature japanese maples in front of the house. They turned out to be from Steve, the gardener of the down-the-hill neighbours, who’d been instructed to dig them out and burn them, but he couldn’t bear it. So we’ve adopted them and put them in the ground, where they’ll either thrive or they won’t but anything’s a bonus over burning, right?

And yesterday we started putting the trusses on the annex. Quite a lot harder than I thought, but then problem solving was always going to be the bulk of this job.

Between me and David we got two up yesterday, which was either the hard part, or the easy part. We’ll find out today which it was.

I would love to get the rest of them on today and get the felt and lath on tomorrow, but that may be wishful thinking.