The Donated House

I had thought it would be just Bob and Jen. Then Esther said she was free. Then Andrew and Daisy, then Ryan, Alec, Sam, two friends of Bob’s I’d never met…

I thought I’d better get the interior of the toilet done before the weekend. It’s only polite.

And since Jorge and I had successfully finished the bunk beds, I made some sheets for them. Jack helped.

I also made a one-hour bench from bits and offcuts. Came out comfy and lovely, and I will make several more, I think.

Everyone arrived by late Saturday morning and work was underway. We set about de-nailing all the rest of the wood from Antony’s old house and auditing it for use in the last building to be built with that batch: the Wendy House, a two-bed bunk-house overlooking the bluebell wood.

Andrew, a keen and efficient manager as well as builder, was indispensable. And quick with a circular saw. He was in charge of cutting all the pieces.

Bob and Jen made an excellent team as usual sticking the bits together and putting them in place.

With all four walls up, we put up the end rafters to hold the ridgepole…

And went and had lunch.

But the frame was soon done, and we set about enjoying it and being very proud.

This took some time, with people taking it in shifts to enjoy the building.

But eventually we managed to get what we thought was the full enjoyment out of it for one day and moved on to other things.

Daisy, Sal and Anna started digging the trench from the water pipe up towards the house site, by way of the shower, which will be a proper shower at some point this summer.

And as it all wound to a close, Andrew enjoyed a swing over the fading bluebells.

I’m exhausted, but also elated, as usual, with how much we got through that would have taken me weeks on my own.

Now Jorge has gone back to Spain, and I might sleep all day tomorrow, or at least waste time on the internet, before my next volunteer arrives in the evening and it’s back to work.

Slightly hard day. So I had to stop at a garden centre and buy an expensive, mature wisteria to cheer myself up. I will build a pergola for it to be trained across, in an arch across the steps down from the drive to the garden.

But of course buying it meant I had to plant it. And the place I had in mind was quite a wet spot, which Swami Google said was not a good idea. So I decided to put it at the top of the steps, which is, of course, backfilled centuries since with large rocks and other crap. So there was a lot of difficult digging to be done.

Jorge (a volunteer from Spain, recently arrived) and I struggled down through the strata. Stone after stone after stone came out, along with bits of broken pottery and just generally sandy soil. But I found a fair number of worms as well, so perhaps that bodes well.

Having made a very deep and wide hole, we backfilled it with good soil mixed with compost from the lovely, lovely humanure compost pile that’s been maturing for a year or so. It’s good stuff, full of happy worms.

I’m certainly sold on this composting toilet thing. It was easy, not too unpleasant and the result is about the best compost I could imagine.

And in other news…

We finished putting the (horribly unpleasant) insulation in the roof of the new sleeping hut, and put the ceiling up (not pictured) (yet).

And started constructing the bed frames, just in time for me to win two ebay auctions for king size foam mattresses which I can cut in half to make decent size single beds. I hope to have all this finished by next weekend when a bunch of volunteer turn up.

And while we were digging around in the compost, we did a bit more planting of annuals in pots. Tomorrow my engineer is coming by with his wife and a couple of friends who are interested in the straw-bale-ness of my little cabin, so I want the place to look at least not neglected… a tall order some weeks. I am a slob.

Christopher’s  work weekend turned out pretty good. Could have been a little warmer and sunnier, but we sure got a lot done. We finally moved the “dance floor” which was built originally to be the floor of a basic outdoor kitchen before we knew we were building the cabin, and ever since has stood in various spots simply being a small square of floor.

It’s now in place on the frame that Bob and I built and ready to receive the rest of the sleeping pod I intend to build on it.

Although I had various other gardening and constructions jobs in mind, when Antony texted that he was ready to be rid of his site office (formerly a sauna shed) I jumped at the opportunity of getting that set up with my weekend workforce.

I’d cleared the site of the former garage (long gone by the time we moved in) which was very handily already flat, level and about the right size.

Antony used his digger arm to remove the roof and cart the bits over to my side of the fence. The floor was moved in pieces and reassembled on the new site.

Luckily it’s a bit of a flat-pack job and it just needed to be bolted together.

And it turns out any idiot can bolt together a few walls.

But we let the skilled guy with the digger put the roof back on while we looked on in awe.

The roof was pretty knackered, so we went out for a bit of plywood and some roofing felt and got to work putting another roof on top of the old one.

And at the end of it we had a mucky hand contest, which Jen won resoundingly.

And then we did a little victory dance for having dismantled and re-mantled a whole building in a weekend. It’ll make a lovely little warm sleeping hut for the house-building volunteers this winter. And then it will go peacefully to its death, having served no less than three purposes and been recycled twice. It is truly on its last legs, but I think it will see us through the winter.

Meanwhile, Anna has finished her beekeeping course, and I accompanied her on the practical session where she got to help inspect a living hive.

And it sure was living. I stood at a safe distance, but they still took quite a lively interest in me at a few points.

The hive looked lively and healthy, so at least we know what we should aspire to as beekeepers. Our new bees are going to arrive in the next couple of weeks, which we’re excited about, and hopefully Anna pretty much knows what to do with them when they arrive.

All the old honeycomb from last year’s dead squatter bees got thrown on the fire, which made quite a cheerful blaze.

And of course, we celebrated it all with a delicious tagine made by Anna.

Not much to report, because most of my job right now is on the computer, discussing sanitation and drainage with a consultant at CAT and exchanging emails with my lovely engineer regarding slab floors and thermal mass for passive solar gain…

But this weekend Anna managed to plant her “Crimson King” red maple tree, and hopefully by the end of the growing season we will be able to spot its head poking above the wall among the green trees at the top of the plot.

And I finished painting the rest of the chairs for inside the cabin. Still need to put the upholstery on, but it’s all cut out and ready to go…

We’ve cruised through so many gardening tasks in the last few days. It’s amazing having two really good, motivated, hard-working volunteers on site.

The vegetable patch, which will be half vegetables, half flowers this year, is two thirds dug over already. I thought it would take days.

The two reclaimed bathtubs are in place, and planted up, and will be amazing when they start filling out and spilling over the sides, and when I’ve found a volunteer who can build dry stone wall around the base of them.

And the bit at the top of the wall has become a lovely garden in waiting… waiting for some warm weather to make it all grow a bit bigger. I have no idea whether any of it will flourish in the conditions I put it in, but I guess you have to try.

The bluebell wood is in full blue bloom. Best season for a swing on the rope swing.

But the best thing to happen all week was this seared chicken with buerre blanc and roasted pepper sauce, plus potato croquettes and purple sprouting broccoli. Kim, one of our volunteers is a chef. This is amazing. I need to recruit more chefs as volunteers.