The Donated House

The ring beam has been completed now.

One of the jobs I was given was to remove the bits of wood from the edges. Sounded easy.

The bit they didn’t mention was that they’d packed them in there with brick and stone and clay, and then slopped concrete over the side which needed to be broken up and removed before there was any hope of “just knocking the wood away”. It took most of the day. Sigh.

But progress is progress, and the insulation is stacked at the top of the drive ready to go in beneath the slab. What a lot of concrete. I wish it hadn’t happened this way, but there’s just such a colossal volume of stuff to learn and know before you build a house, and in the end, the foundations just had to be done in the conventional way because I left it too late and didn’t have the brain-space to figure out the alternatives. Shit happens when you build a house from scratch with no experience.

It started out a lovely, sunny Sunday. Nicola and Rob came over, as did Rich for his first viewing of the land. We did some huge stone moving (hey, no injured fingers! I’m getting better at this!) and some ditch digging for the electric cable pipe to be embedded under the foundation slab, finished up the interior of the Wendy House, Anna evicted some bees (as you do)…

Actually, the bit about the bees was interesting. The one hive is absolutely thriving, though not putting by any honey because it’s a rubbish year. Never mind, they’ll be strong going into winter. But the other hive was really struggling and we couldn’t see a queen, or any evidence of the existence of a queen, the last several times we inspected. So they were basically done-for. But the guy who sold them to us is going to replace them, and he said to dump them out near the entrance of the other hive, with a board to climb up to get in the door, and they would likely mostly be accepted into the other hive. Then we can clean out the dead hive and get it ready for the new nucleus.

Anyway, after we’d done all the work and were having a tea (ok, gin) break, it started to absolutely pour down. The picture above really doesn’t do it justice. It was biblical. So we continued to sample the gins and played a bit of Quiddler and knocked off work for the rest of the day. Which was fine because we’d got everything done for once!

Ok, so here is the flattened build site. Looks lovely and tidy.

Until they start digging it up. Then it looks a scary mess. But Steven is an artist with a digger.

The trench is dug out until we find solid ground.

And the ring beam is filled with concrete. I didn’t want to use concrete, but I didn’t get my sh*t together and learn about the alternatives in time to sort it out properly. Everything takes twice as long as you think, even when you are not in the middle of other kinds of chaos at the same time. Prospective self-builders take note.

Anyway, I went to see Debbie in Harrogate to get away from it all, and we visited an RHS garden where I got lots of inspiration for the site when we are no longer building and can concentrate on gardening.

Woven willow when it gets a bit more mature… I so very want this.

And a lovely wildflower meadow. I’m having this next summer. The bees will love it.

Just like they love Anna. One got in her bonnet (not kidding) and stung her on the face. And when one stings, it releases a pheromone that tells the others to go into attack mode. It was pretty intense. But only two stings in the end, and good news! She’s not deathly allergic! Having never been stung, she wasn’t sure.

And finally, I’m building the beds in the wendy house. Sort of kind of maybe on track to welcome all these builder-people in September… with a fair wind.

Yesterday work got rained off about mid-afternoon, but they managed to get all the stones out of the wall and make a giant mud-pit of the place before that.

It’s a real shame to lose that wall, but obviously if the foundations need it to come out in order to be stable, there’s not a lot we can argue about.

It’s possible we’ll be able to scoop it back up and rebuild something similar, maybe a bit further forward.

But for now it’s a bit of a mudslide.

However, it has left the build site free of topsoil and smoothed out nicely.

The little weed of a hazel tree near the loo (which had got a bit big, actually), provider of many sausage-cooking sticks over the last four years, had to come out. But Anna and I butchered it up and it will make a week’s firewood, once it’s seasoned.

Stay tuned for further updates as time permits.