The Donated House

I just love my friends. That’s all.

Anyway, here are some pictures.

It’s been really cold.

And then also sometimes warm. But only for two days.

Andy helped me put up a big awkward piece of plasterboard.

Anna helped me put up the other and I managed all the small pieces and some stupidly awkward filling of edges and corners.

And it doesn’t look terrible.

In a day or two, when it’s all dry and soforth, we are ready to put up two of the panels of the ceiling painting. Then on to the second half of this most crazy awkward of jobs that I will be very pleased to see the back of.

Up and down, up and down.

Been here before. Blogging become a terrible chore, so I never do it. Many things are going on, and I am failing to document them because that adds and extra 10% to my mental load and my mental load is already crushing sometimes.

I’m pottering around re-organising things in the now-enclosed-and-approximately-heated house, which Anna and I have moved into, although it’s very far from finished. I’ve sort of got a plan to do one half of the finishing and then move all the stuff and do the other half… but electrics don’t really work that way, what with rings and soforth… I need to consult Ben, who is, luckily, coming on Thursday.

Anyway, next three big milestones inside will be:

• Ceiling above the front windows done
• Home office and craft room habitable
• Kitchen cobbled together from bits lying around, and plumbed in.

No idea how long that will take. Some days I work a lot, some days I can’t face life at all. Never know what kind of a day it’s going to be.

Other upcoming milestones are:

• Getting a lot further on with the rendering in April/May (thanks 5 million, Mike and Heidi)
• Tidying up and burning/dumping ALL the detritus of materials and stuff that’s been littering up the garden for 6 years. See work party listing at right.

Head down, keep at it.

Christmas happened. We ate food.

Above is Christmas Eve’s dosa and dhal and potato masala. Very traditional. Below is Christmas day’s roast chicken.

Jack likes the masonry heater.

At some point Anna made a really good mousaka.

We went and stayed with Bob and Jen for a week and played computer games and generally did not think about building. That was heavenly.

Heidi and Mike came to visit for the first time in years and because they are wonderful, they helped us empty the huge carload of dry logs I’d gone to fetch that morning. Heidi also gave me the biggest haul of booty from her pottery showroom, as she was having a clear-out, so I’m the proud owner of a number of wonderful new things. They are just the greatest people.

Among us all we managed to move and stack the firewood in, like, half an hour.

So basically my state of mind right now is like, friends are amazing. Building houses is just shit. It’s so shit. I can’t believe people do this more than once. But friends are amazing.

Antony, who is hands-down the biggest contributor of skilled labour to this project, came round and did a big pile of plumbing for me, so that not only do we have running cold water to the house now (albeit from a length of plastic pipe danging from the ceiling) we also have running “hot” water from a tank which may or may not ever get above room temperature depending on whether this heater manages to heat it… jury seems to be out.

Antony spent a couple of half days doing a sterling job with all the pipe-work. I did a bit of fitting copper pipes and was on hand to block leaks when we accidentally started filling the system without having blocked off the drainage point. Oops.

I also got on with insulating above the windows, including finally moving the scaffolding across the gap. Finished that bit today and have started moving around the rest of the roof, so as to make it not silly to heat the place.

Antony, left to his own devices, came up with this amazing maze of copper.

So, having turned on the water and nothing was leaking (the third time) I build a big fire in the masonry heater.

And two or three hours later the bench was toasty warm.

It is now hard to keep from sitting on it all day instead of working.

But I’m going to try to get all the insulation in by next weekend so we can tidy up, get some sofas and a coffee table out and play house in there over Christmas.

Beautiful, snowy weekend here, but by buggery it’s cold. 5 or 6 degrees warmer indoors than out, but that’s not much comfort. I spent the day drawing the cartoon for the ceiling painting.

It’s going really well, but my hands and feet were freezing. I had to take a lot of breaks.

I don’t think Alec will be able to paint it until I can heat the place, which I’m currently hoping to be doing by the middle of January.

I heard a rumour it would be a snowy winter, which pleased me greatly. So far so good, as this is more snow than we’ve had in years. More forecast for tomorrow. Feels Christmassy.