The Donated House

Craig showed off his tool sharpening equipment and prowess. He does like a sharp chisel. He found a nice old plane at the junk market, just needed a good sharpen!

The last big delivery of wood went off without a hitch, due to some very professional drivers with proper consideration for not blocking the road.

Jules did some cutting with the tremendously large circular saw. Even chisel-mad Craig has had to admit it’s a much more efficient way to get a tenon cut.

But there’s always a bit of tidying up to do, so we get our chiseling fix.

Meanwhile I cut a couple of mortises under Craig’s supervision. Not at all difficult once you get your head round it all, but as they experienced guys point out, the more powerful the tool, the faster and easier it makes it to ruin a piece of wood. No catastrophes yet!

Craig does a beautiful job cleaning up joints. He gets teased for being a “cabinet maker” by the super-efficient framers, but I enjoy his attention to detail.

We’re nearly done with the first cross-frame. It isn’t moving fast by Nick’s standards, but it feels like we’ve done a lot of work. Hopefully we’ll speed up as we all get more confident.

Not much time to write, got to go to laundrette, do shopping, make food, build house, etc.

Treated self to AWESOME folding knife at builder’s merchants.

Solution found to delivering hugely long timbers was to use a lorry designed to move farm machinery around.

The driver had said they were too big to “man”-handle but we proved him wrong. Hooray for physics.

Broke out the new mortisers and set them up.

Craig, who has used them before, explained how they work.

Everyone had a go, including Esther.

We all eat lunch.

Scribing, which is basically a matter of putting bits of wood next to and on top of other bits of wood and then fiddling around with exactly where they are until everything is parallel or perpendicular within a very small margin of error.

I cut a tenon with the HUGE circular saw and then had to tidy up the cut with my lovely new framing chisel.

And Nick showed off his massive chisel which is apparently called a “slick”.

Jack had to come and make sure we all knew he still existed.

And the place definitely looks like a building yard now.

More as time allows. Am crazy busy all the time.

Imposter Syndrome is that thing where you feel like you’ve presented yourself as someone who knows what they’re doing, but really you’re just blagging and pretending to know what’s going on, and that any minute the people around you will catch on that you have no idea what you’re doing and are just making it up as you go along.

In an academic setting, it’s always seemed to me to be fairly unimportant, because everybody’s kind of blagging when it comes to academics. Academics and blagging have so much natural overlap that there can never be any real consequences to making stuff up in the field of philosophy or law or art history or whatever. It’s kind of expected, and you can’t necessarily distinguish blagging from knowing in all that theoretical subject matter.

However, in the field of building houses…

Here are some pictures of the last hours before my life became one long string of crisis-averting-decision-demanding-problem-solving occurrences, each of which usurps the one before it, which must then be kept in a neat queue and dealt with in turn…

Lovely Craig sits by the fire pit and noodles away on his guitar.

Anna finishes off the trench for the plumbing and electricity to reach the shower.

And then does the plumbing, which is fully and totally successful and Anna deserves a medal. Later the electricians showed up and we now have a fully working shower.

Last day before everyone else turned up and it all went mad. A lovely lunch for me,  Craig, Anna and Esther.

First day of actual work, building sawhorses and putting up the marquee for cover.

It was a hive of activity.

Lovely to watch a great team of people getting on really well.

Meanwhile, for your amusement, here are some of the screw-ups I’ve dealt with in the last two days:

When Hywel delivered the first loads of timber and made a list of what he reckoned was there, it didn’t quite tally with Nora’s list, so she sent me a spreadsheet and I set Esther and Lisa to count it all, and their tally didn’t agree with either.  Still working on that one.

During all that, it came to light that I, through not having paid proper attention, only ever sent the house cutting list to Nora, so I have not even ordered the timber for the “link” bit, which means there’s a whole chunk of extra budget I didn’t budget for, but has a silver lining in that we don’t really have enough space to store that much timber anyway, so putting up one bit and getting it roofed and then using it as a workspace makes a lot of sense. And also, Nick designed the link in a way much more complicated than it needed to be because it was going to have to slot into the Hall when we built that, but I’m seriously, really not feeling up to building something that big now, so I think I will be redesigning it significantly smaller, therefore we can simplify the link design, which is obviously better done before timber gets ordered. But costs me more money. Sigh.

What Nora has been cutting for me has been quite rustic in quality, which I love from an aesthetic perspective, but is perhaps less useful when stuff is not quite as thick as it should be (probably fine in the end) or slightly less long than it should be (really not fine, though it’s only one piece that we have found) and also I failed to impress upon her the importance of having it all milled up and on site by the start of the framing, and between us we have managed to be so casual that we’re both now panicking and rushing to figure out how to get the right pieces here in time to make proper use of the paid professionals.

The stuff that Nora couldn’t cut, which is coming from a mill in Wakefield, is being delivered on Friday, but they took one look at the access road and declared that they couldn’t do it. Helpful. So I have arranged for them to come to the bottom of the hill and for a guy with a lorry that’s meant for transporting farm machinery and whatnot, but which can get 7-meter pieces of wood up our access road to do runs up the hill with the stuff. With a bit of luck that won’t all go horribly wrong on the day.

And a million other little things.

Yesterday nearly had me in tears. Which is not unexpected at all. I’m a bit like that.

Today I will try to chill out.

The good news is, I’m so busy I haven’t got time to be stressed.