The Donated House

This place is so cool. I am beyond glad I came here.

On the way in, I coincided with the arrival of one of the volunteers on the train, so she was able to direct me to the place and show me around. I didn’t manage to take pictures today of the roundhouses and other buildings, because I got so caught up in the work I was doing.

This is the frame Alice built, soon to be roofed and walled. Breathtaking. Awe inspiring. I so very want one of these. I am courting Alice to come and work for me.

Dafydd, the site manager, showed me and Eleri how to trace the templates for the knee joints for the farmhouse extension that’s being built next.

Eleri and I then got on with finding appropriate board and fitting as many tracings on them as we could, following the grain and not including too much sap wood. I am learning so much.

The wood yard, where the thirty-odd trees that have been cut up are stored.

After lunch, Jax and I learned to saw the tenon ends of the knee joints ready for chiselling out. Jax was new to the circular saw, but took to it very well.

Using a circular saw is fun. Using any power tool is fun. That I think that is probably a good sign for me as a builder of houses…

Dafydd used the mobile band saw, because that takes a bit of skill. I desperately want one of these, Elmo would love it, but apparently they cost upwards of £3000.

It was so quick and easy to cut the curves of the braces. If I can’t find a second-hand one to buy, I’ll have to try to rent one, I think.

This depth-gauge-scratchy-tool marked the depth of the tenon, and therefore how much we needed to take off the other side.

The circular saw was set to the appropriate depth each time because there’s a fair amount of variation in the thickness of the pieces. The tenon needs to be quite an exact size, so you cut off whatever’s left after that.

The next step was to make a series of cuts, to enable the chiseling out of the excess.

After an afternoon of good progress, we collected and stacked the rest of the pieces we’d traced out and tarped them. Tomorrow’s forecast is not as nice as today’s, but hopefully we’ll be able to make more progress on it. I’m not sure what the wet weather plan is, but I hope it’s chiseling out the ones we did today, so that I can have done one beginning to end.

This is fabulous. I have got to come back here and bring Elmo.

Well, the snow-cat didn’t survive the night and its additional snowfall of a couple of heavy inches.

And neither did the marquee.

We hurd a bit of a slushy whump in the night and assumed it was snow falling off the roof.

So I’ve spent the  morning of my birthday (yes, happy birthday to me) clearing out the stuff that was in there. It’s not a mega-disaster. While we can’t argue we were exactly clever about this, we aren’t stupid and we did see this coming, so most of what’s in there was just stuff being kept vaguely dry while we were to lazy to deal with it properly.

The wood and tools have all got places to go and went there over the course of the morning, and the chairs and various other bits have gone to the sheds.

There may even be enough salvageable bits from the frame that we can cobble together a shorter version of the marquee and cover it with a tarp.

The couch, under that blue tarp, had got so wet before this even happened that it’s for the tip anyway. Hopefully it will stay just dry enough to remain movable and we can be rid of it next weekend when I hope to have some people to help clear up. And drink this tequila.

On a brighter note, last night I made the most killer sausage and aubergine pasta sauce!

I decided that, since I have never been particularly talented at plastering, I would try to find a book, something old, with tiny print and yellowed pages, hopefully with etchings and spidery type, to paper the ceiling with. To my utter delight, at today’s junk market in town I found two Girl’s Own Annuals from 1882 and 1883, in such knackered condition outside that it will not feel like a crime to cut them apart.

They’re practically falling out of their bindings, though one is a bit better than the other. I will probably try to do the whole job with the one and keep the other for reading entertainment.

From the Answers to Correspondents section, Nov 18th, 1882:

“To Hernine: Accept our warm acknowledgements of your gratifying letter. We also thank you for offering a prescription for the use of those suffering from a taint in the breath. We are aware that the use of charcoal powder, as sold by chemists, is good for this complaint, as for others. We think that to take a teaspoon of it with water half an hour before dinner is a better method than spread on bread-and-butter.”

“To Flora: Your “watercolour drawings,” so called, are fearful achievements. Pray do not waste your time in pursuing the study of painting, nor our time in sending us examples.”

Some of the pages are marvellously illustrated.

Some are a bit simpler and some are all text. All are a bit yellow at the edges and stained. I’m really quite excited about this. Better get on with finishing the plasterboarding, I guess.

Well, somebody gave me a bottle of tequila, and I thought, what the hell, I’ll google it and see if there’s anything palatable than can be done with it. So that led me to Grenadine, which I now know is a pomegranate syrup used in a lot of cocktails. Only, as with a lot of things, these days there’s none of the original ingredient in it if you buy it at the supermarket. It’s basically sugar syrup and artificial red colouring. So, what was I to do but make my own?

The first step is peeling (de-seeding? disassembling?) the pomegranates. I was lucky, having picked them up on sort of a whim at Morrisons, that they were actually really ripe and good.

Having boiled it up with a bit of water to keep it from burning (which it threatened to do at first) I strained it, ignoring the conventional advice not to mash the pulp. Damned if I’m going to make do with half the product, even if it would be lovely and clear.

I got just over a cup, mixed it with an equal quantity of sugar and boiled it for a bit. Recipes disagreed about how long, but they all said a number in minutes, which I know to be irrelevant, so I just boiled the sugar into dissolution.

Luckily, Elmo had just finished a jar of jam, so I sterilised it and bottled some for later use. Meanwhile, Elmo and I are enjoying a glass each of Tequila and sangrita. Well, I say “enjoying”…

Luckily, there are also grenadine and gin cocktails, because I’m pretty sure I’m going to donate the rest of this tequila to the nearest student house party.