The Donated House

Before she went off on a 6-week sojourn to elsewhere, Nora was good enough to come and spend a few days doing *extremely useful stuff* here, including chainsawing a bunch of my walls flat. Amazing stuff. All the other tools I’ve ever used for that have SUCKED.

She did all the accessible walls that didn’t already have render on them. This should make it go a lot quicker with the render.

And with a view to getting Alec in his room even if the rest of the place is still a building site, we’ve started claying the walls.

Meanwhile, window installation has begun. Nora showed me how to do it on the first two, and I’ve been running with it ever since. We had to invent a bit, because Ben and I didn’t know how the posts within the straw walls were supposed to work and put them too close together, but our workarounds have been pretty successful. An extra bit of 2×4 moves the aperture toward the outside of the building a bit and makes it the right width for the window to fit with some wedges…

…which Nora was good enough to make me a massive batch of. The sills get fixed first, then the 2×4 extenders, then the window gets wedged in and fixed.

And then glazing! Which is a piece of cake on the small ones. I had to wait for Richard to be available to do the big ones though, and the giant one in Alec’s room was pretty nerve-wracking.

Superheroes that we are, though, we did it.

And now it’s back to lime. I love it and I hate it. It’s very interesting stuff, I’m proud to have made my own putty so successfully, but my skin is not pleased to be doing this again.

Whole lotta moisturiser.

Anyway, filling in around the windows requires a long straw and lime mixture, which is going to have to be applied in layers because some of the window cavities are really deep and I don’t reckon I’d like to go any deeper then 100mm with this mix, or I’m afraid it won’t carbonate in the middle.

I’ve just about got the hang of making it now. The putty wants to be pretty loose, like thin yogurt or even double cream. It’s amazing how much straw you put in and it just loses all its volume when it gets wet and sticky. Good thing I’ve got tons of it lying around.

The perimeter of the windows got a slip coat of lime on the straw bits and a bunch of galvanised nails in the wood bits as a key. Advice, as in so many cases, is split on the use of steel in contact with lime. I chose to believe it would be fine.

The sticky lime-coated straw stayed in place beautifully. I reckon each window will need a maximum of three goings-over with the stuff, with a week’s drying time between, before I can render over it and be done. But the word “done” is such a beautiful word, isn’t it?

And in the meantime, there’s gin to be made. A very great quantity of last year’s went at the recent party, so I’ll have to make double stock this year. Gooseberry is one of my new flavours, and I’ve just decanted a bit of black elder and lemon that I think might be my new favourite.

Well. It’s been a busy few days.

A giant work party was on the horizon last week, so I though it was time to decant a bunch of last year’s fruit gin. This picture was shortly before the bottle, left unattended, ran over and soaked my laptop. Happily, it seems fine now, having dried out.

The orange sherbet rose is out in full force, smelling amazing and adding to the generally cheerful atmosphere.

We went for a walk on Thursday and picked some of the first bilberries, but then met two really cute ponies on the way home and lost half the crop to them.

Anna’s friend Alice came for a visit and was most helpful, particularly when the sand delivery only made it as far as the bottom of the hill, and we had to shovel it into buckets and drive it up in the car. It took three trips, which wasn’t so bad.

The lime putty is getting really good. I opened a tub of it that had been sitting around a long time, half empty and not particularly well lidded, but it was fine, and made a fantastic slurry with some long straw to fill in some bits. Nicola and Rob did a beautiful job making some very concave bits come out flat.

And Lea and Catie helped me remedy a mistake I’d made with the wall rendering. First we knocked off the old render at the bottom.

Then Catie attached the bell cast bead, which is a sort of long plastic tray you render down to and it forms a drip edge so your walls don’t shed directly on your concrete.

That should help with some of the damp. Meanwhile, Anna cleaned the roof. It was practically becoming a green roof, but not the good kind. Kate did some gardening, of the sort where you dig out all the weeds and stick down some black plastic. We need a lot of that around here.

I think we had 16 or 17 people on site at one point.

Lea’s gift of plantains went down well although sadly she’d left by the time we ate them.

Teams of people set about removing some of the straw from around the windows. Another remedy for a bit of a mistake made in the early stages, where the posts weren’t sited where they needed to be for the windows. So now we have to invent a window installation method. Luckily, we’ve got Nora to help. Kate and Sam, below, are doing a marvellous job with cutting, splicing and hitching the baling twine.

Bob and Jen doing the same.

So that Nora can come in with her chainsaw and prepare the ground.

Meanwhile Ryan cut the sills to length (while Esther took careful measurements for the front glazing later on) and Rob and Christopher oiled the sills ready to be put in.

Steven helped make the sill steadying triangulation devices (part of the aforementioned completely newly invented window installation method.)

And we were ready to put in the glass.

It’s all pretty complicated and I have a lot of windows to do, but at least I have some idea what I’m doing now. So more on this later I guess.

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We went down to London for the day to go to a performance of Twelfth Night at the Globe, which was quite good. I especially enjoyed the woodwork, as it’s quite a unique timber frame building. The play was also good.

On the way back, we stopped over with Ben at his amazing new home/job near Lincoln at Hill Holt Wood, which is a working woodland/education centre/workshop/building design firm/many other things. The place was absolutely amazing and Ben is super-happy there, which is just great to see.

One of the buildings, a rammed-earth conference room, has the most amazing double reciprocal roof.

And the cupboards in the employees’ housing are basically exactly what I want in my kitchen.

Back at the farm, we made a litre or so of redcurrant gin, thanks to the thriving plot of currants planted last year by Incredible Edible in Todmorden.

Anyway, on with the main plot. Charlotte came for a day and helped out with the spiral staircase installation.

We’d managed to get the floor frame in place and the pole upright before we went away.

So the first step yesterday was to get the pole stood on its base (which I finished building and mega-screwed into place) and get the treads all on it.

Anna stuck them on from above while I mostly just held the pole upright.

The last bit of securing the pole in place was slightly awkward because of needing to have several things go into place at once, each of which was supposed to support the other and all of which was supposed to support the one safe thing to stand on…

We managed to cobble it together eventually, though I had to re-cut a piece three times.

It’s not done, hoping to finish it today, but you can climb up it if you’re careful, and if you don’t mind it spinning slightly.

And anyway, most importantly, it looks the dog’s danglies, as they say in this most erudite and sophisticated of countries.

Now I’ll just get back to work so that it can be actually finished and safe…

Yeah, you heard right. I’ve actually been getting on with it. And it hasn’t even been that hard. It’s amazing what four weeks off does for motivation.

Richard and I have insulated and boarded out one entire end of the attic space, and Anna spent the weekend moving a whole bunch of stuff into the finished end so that we’d have room to work on the unfinished end.

The floor in the middle area is now completely clear and ready to start reframing to accommodate the spiral staircase, which I went down to Chapel en le Frith to pick up, nearly seven years after buying it.

Here it is in bits on the table. Well, some of it, anyway. I’m very, very excited to put it up. It’ll need some customising to fit where I want it, as it was built for another house entirely with a much lower floor to floor measurement. So it will be a bit of a bespoke installation.

While we were down in that area of the world, we finally collected the giant old school cupboard and pie safe that had been held by the lovely people who bought our old house years ago. We hadn’t got the room for them and Kieran and Laura were kind enough to look after them until we could come for them. It was a lovely trip down that way, seeing the old neighbours and stopping in at Kieran’s new cheese shop, Chinley Cheese, well worth a visit if you’re in the area.

I promised to photo-document the whole process of getting the giant cupboard out of their house and into a van (we did it, Kieran, just me and Richard. We are superhuman!) but then of course the whole thing was a bit too fraught for taking pictures.

So instead, here is a picture of another piece of furniture entirely!

We spotted this in one of Todmorden’s innumerable junk outlets and immediately saw it for the finishing touch to our (not yet existent) kitchen. It turned out to be the right size for the space we had in mind and the right price (cheaper then the materials I would need to build something not as nice) so we went for it.

And finally, here is a picture of the rather flamboyant montbretia lucifer that Joan gave me last autumn. Absolutely flourishing. I will be covering whole hillsides with them; I love them.

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It’s been the most gloriously beautiful day here. There could be no excuse for working indoors.

Anna worked on planting all the stuff that’s been languishing in pots for way too long. We’re converting what used to be the spoil pile from the cabin’s foundation pits into a beautiful flower bed.

The montbretia lucifer that Joan gave me is going to flower! I’m quite excited; I wasn’t sure it would in its first year.

The rose albertine is performing as expected. It’s a shame that corner is currently a bit of a storage area/dumping ground. Next year it will be a sitting garden.

We finally gave up on the monstrous clematis montana rubens that wasn’t one of those at all, and hardly ever flowered and when it did they weren’t all that nice. I tore it all out and replaced it with a red one. Hopefully that will fare a little better.

The corner of the outdoor kitchen looks a lot less menacing now without the old clematis attempting to strangle us.

I planted a cooking herb garden, wanting to have a bit of this and that available for food. Coriander, mint, basil, thyme and parsley. All the herbs I really ever use.

And a dinner of salads, including cumbrian cured meat and some lovely tomatoes from the new farm shop at Gordon Rigg’s nursery, plus my first ever perfect “ma’s” potato salad.

I freakin’ love summer.