The Donated House

Essential preparations took place right up until Friday evening. Including having Sarah-May do my roots.

Daisy came for a couple of days and we quickly put her to work with a chop saw.

Ben, pictured here taking a very well earned, and lately very rare, break from carpentry, has worked like a dog for weeks to get everything ready, and continues to excel as the walls go up. Ben has seriously earned a place in the Donated House hall of volunteer fame.

The base plate had to be completed and screwed down before the course began. We almost managed, but were finishing the last bits as they were learning the ways of bales.

And then we had to scurry a bit to get the door and window posts up in time.

However, come Wednesday morning when the trainees were doing the dry run (in the dry as well!) we were out of the way doing stuff the other side of the building.

It’s a really nice group of people, very friendly and enthusiastic, and very skillfully led by Barb Jones of Straw Works.

Towards the end of Wednesday, we were ready to lay the first bale in its final place, and I was asked to do the honours, starting with fixing the spikes it would sit on.

Then Sian and I lifted it into place…

And pushed it down…

And finally stood on it to compress it.

Even though no rain was forecast, we covered all the bales at the end of the day.

The walls are fairly flying up now. People got so fast at it that my initial trepidation at the slowness of day one was totally assuaged. I think we have a very good chance of getting up to 6-bale ringbeam height in the next two days.

Ben has had recognition as the excellent carpenter that he is, and has been picking up as much as he can of the baling techniques as well. Here he is knocking pins in with Barb.

Steve and Michelle are making a half-bale.

Nadine and Joao worked all day yesterday on the very boring 16m stretch of back wall.

Kalman and Yin cut notches in bales to fit round the window and door posts.

At the end of yesterday we’d got four bales up and were pinning them all down in preparation for this morning.

It really feels like progress. It’s amazing the transformation that’s taking place from skeleton to home.

And the atmosphere on site is amazing as well. These are truly lovely people and I hope they will come back and see the building in all its future glory.

Well, the first lot of straw arrived.

It was about two hundred bales, a little over a third of the total I need.

Since the delivery vehicle couldn’t get up the hill to the site, I enlisted the help of a local farmer, who sent his two young assistants and his tractor and trailer.

they made two trips, between which we had to unload and remove all the straw.

Luckily, approximately all the people in the world arrived to help move it.

We set up a veritable conveyor belt and got it moved almost faster than I could believe.

And as a bonus, I made several new friends, as my neighbour Steve brought his son and his friend, and Nora invited a friend, so a whole bunch of totally new people turned up.

With them, Anna, Ben, Sarah-May and me, it was a small army of helpers.

We all sweated and ached a bit, but it really went so well and so fast. And when we were done, we took a well earned break.

Now that the house is full of straw, it’s a little more challenging as a woodworking space, but we have still managed to put up the last bits of the internal framing pieces and lay out the entire base plate. We’ve got about 80 hazel stubs to whittle and a lot of guest accommodation prep to do before Wednesday, but we’re pretty much on track I think.

So Ben suggested using shredded tyres as infill for the base plate, which, after a bit of research on its properties, I though was a marvellous idea. Especially when I learned that the total cost would be £25. So I went to this tyre recycling place and was alarmed at the size of the tyres they have lying around.

And filled the back of my car with bags of shredded tyres. Bargain.

Meanwhile, we were trying to solve the problem of how to haul the huge, industiral-strength tarp up to the second floor to sling it over the rope ridge we made. Too much weight and friction to simply drag it by rope over the edge…

Ben said “where’s that knackered old wheelbarrow…” and proceeded to turn it into a pulley wheel we could bolt to the edge of the floor.

He was rightfully extremely pleased with his invention.

And it worked beautifully. And now the whole site is dry.

Woke up to red sky in the morning… and it was a bit rainy, though not anything too horrible.

And it got drier as the day went on, at least on the inside of the building.

Nora and Ben did the majority of the clambering around while I ran around doing the fetching and measuring and cutting from below.

And at about 5pm we put the last nail in the last bit of lath.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am that I will be working under a roof from now on. RAIN ALL YOU WANT, TODMORDEN!

Is the best kind of snow. When you’re a roofer, anyway.

Anna helped me and Ben all weekend, so we got most of the back roof felted and some of the front by the end of Sunday, and we thought that we would therefore be done today, but you know, it never quite goes as fast as you’d like it to.

Anyway, Ben and I did get as far as the top of the dormer on the front side, so once we’ve done the fiddly bits of dormer ridge, it should fly on. Hopefully. Touch wood and fingers crossed.

A note to Ben’s mum: I swear to God I make him tie himself securely to something strong before I let him do this stuff.

Every time I look across the valley I see this pub, the one we used to go to and see if we could spot our land. I bet you can spot it now, but we still haven’t been to check.