The Donated House

Another day of making windows. There is much to say on the subject, but it is nearing time to go south for Christmas which means I’m in panic packing mode, so I’ll write more in January when I’ve got a bit further.

Here is Nora taking apart her jig for cutting mortises with her lovely shiny new cutter in her router.

And here is an example of the fruits of my labour all day. They looked a bit better after I’d broken off all the teeth and chiseled the tenon flat, but I didn’t take any pictures of that. Too busy working.

I’ve been meaning to blog for a number of months now. Sorry for not getting around to it. I’ve been doing some much needed personal healing (or whatever)… getting my mojo back? Something like that. Anyway, I feel a bit more positive about the whole thing than I have in a while.

So here’s some update:

This is the house in the recent frosty weather. That’s what it looks like now. Not a lot moved on from when you last read about it, but a pretty picture, no?

I’ve been pottering about inside trying to get stuff tidied up that’s been sitting around taking up space for ages. It’s a surprisingly time-consuming affair. And then we had to move out of Alec’s house in Barnsley, including moving Alec here, so that took up a month or so. All in all, very little has been done that’s worth photographing and telling you about. Until now.

This afternoon I went over to Nora’s workshop and helped cut, rip and plane the bits of wood for the building of the windows. It’s pretty exciting stuff. She’d already done some, so as to get her head properly around the process before letting me come and complicate matters with my inexperience, so we’re in a good position to start a bit of a production line now.

I’ll try (no promises, sorry) to properly document the exciting stuff as it happens.

Some of our favourite people in the world, Catie, Simon and Bob (sadly Jen couldn’t make it) came to visit, to help with some work and to play games. It was a really fun, refreshing and productive weekend. Thanks guys!

We managed to put up all the fascia boards, which means I can put up the guttering now, which means a lot less backsplash on my walls!

As I have no floor set up on the scaffolding at the back, it was a fairly uncomfortable job.

We got it all done though, which is a major job ticked off the list. Very pleasing.

We also built a hoist/lift thing to get boxes of stuff up to the storage space in the attic because we’re moving out of the house in Barnsley, so EVERYTHING has to come here and find a place to be stored. And it turns out to be really difficult to carry huge boxes of books up two ladders.

We used the wheel off Ben’s sawn-off-upside-down-wheelbarrow (patent pending) and a piece of threaded steel to make a pulley wheel. I wouldn’t like to carry anything too heavy but it worked great for boxes of books.

It’s nice to have a deadline, actually, to get all this stuff moved. At least that motivates us to get off our butts and do it.

And Anna made a new friend…Save

First honey harvest off the bees. My god it’s a messy process. But tasty.

Anna was super-pleased with this frame, for obvious reasons. Absolutely perfect. They weren’t all like that, but there were a lot of them.

You have to uncap the cells first, so the honey can theoretically run out in the extractor.

It worked superbly on a frame this perfect.

So amazing. Unfortunately the lumpy, dark, pollen-hard ones were a little more challenging and a little less attractive.

Into the extractor, which is basically a big salad spinner, letting centripetal force get the honey out of the cells.

Sieve the results and we get about 4 pints of beautiful, pure, cold-extracted honey.

Nicola and Rob were there and very helpful, so I jarred up a bit for them to take home.

We were really pleased with the cold-processed stuff. The rest was a bit full of pollen, waxy bits, and whatever else the dark, grainy, hard stuff is in honeycomb, I don’t really know. I’ve boiled it up to get the wax off it, and the honey that results at the bottom is a bit darker, perfectly edible, but I assume there’s a reason you’re not supposed to heat it, so it’s sort of “seconds”. I’m sure as hell still going to use it though, because there’s more of that than there was of the virgin stuff and to be honest, I sort of prefer the taste of the head-processed. We’re calling it honey molasses. Call in if you want to taste test.

I never thought it would be this amazing to never have to do something again.