The Donated House

Well, I may have done my back no good at all, but we have a frame for a porch floor now.

Elmo was good enough to bring most of the 4.8m lengths of board down from the top of the drive where they’d been delivered, but I sawed them up and hung all the joist hangers and I’ve never known so many different awkward angles to hold myself at for a long string of brief periods. See above for an example. Anyway, it’s done, and the posts for the front edge are soaking in creosote round the back, so hopefully we’ll have a covered porch in another few days.

We’ll probably sling a few bits of old plywood on it for now, can’t really afford any proper flooring material at the moment, but it’ll be nice not to be paddling around in the mud like we were.

I’ve done nothing at all interesting with food in the last few days, so I’ll have to leave you with this lovely photo of the oblique angle of the sun casting pretty shadows from the leaves that fall on top of the marquee.

I just had a shower and it was getting on towards time, really. I smelled like a hobo.

Just back from a fairly productive four days at the cabin, cracking on with claying out the inside of the building. Weather fairly decent for most of it, as seen below.

Here I am early in the process, just figuring out how to spread the stuff over, and work it into, the straw walls, before I became so covered in it that I could have been confused with a mud wrestler.

It’s just a fairly thin clay mixture with some sand in, I think, which has to be spread over the interior walls as a key for the thicker coat of plaster that is to come. Not plaster-plaster, it’s clay as well, but a different mix. Much of the back wall ended up being pretty flat, after packing out some bits with straw-and-clay wodges, but there are bits that we will be referring to as the Gaudiesque walls. Turns out it’s pretty hard to get straight lines with the re-used bales with clay already on them.

By the end of the weekend we’d pretty much done the slip coat and the packing out, plus attached hessian strips to the top edge and clayed them down, as visible here. Bob finally made it out to the place, and was extremely helpful as well as extremely amusing. He and Alec had a fabulous conversation regarding the use of the word “metal” as an adjective, coming to the conclusion that it was similar to “cool” but less broad, and that the important thing was that anything it was said of should also be “awesome.” It was agreed that Alec would be best advised to eschew any usage.

No particular reason for this photo, besides that the sunlight streaming in the window makes me happy and I can’t wait til it’s streaming in over my little home.

We didn’t quite work til after dark this time, which was nice, but it was drawing in a bit when I hung the last joist hanger, in preparation for framing the porch floor next time we’re there. That’ll quickly be followed by the porch roof, which will happen at the same time as the rest of the roof, which I really hope will be soon. The weather forecast is for storms, wind and some low-single-digit temperatures, so I’m keen to get to the point of putting in the wood stove as soon as possible.

Got to clean the house tomorrow in preparation for a viewing. Fingers eternally crossed!

Here, as promised, is a small selection of photos from the recent works.

Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to get a decent photo of the whole house, as it’s under a fairly low-slung tarp cover, and to see under it, you have to be so close to the house as to not be able to fit more than a couple of bales into the shot. But it’s not long now til the tarp comes off, I hope, and I can post pictures of the building in all its glory.

In the meantime, this is the view along the back of the building, before the scaffolding was erected and after.

Elmo supervised the putting up of it, so it’s on a solid and level base, I can tell you, not a wobbly bit of wood in sight, and dead level. So what if it took all day to put up?

And then Rae walked in and asked why we had put it round the back of the building. I could only reply that Barbara had measured up back there and told me how much to get according to how much room there was, so I assumed that was where we needed it. I’m still not sure exactly what role it’s going to play, besides helping us heft enormous sheets of plywood up there, so I guess we’ll learn as we go along, as usual.

Here’s a fairly unflattering shot of me shaving the hairy bits off the walls. An incredibly dusty job that is, and I must remember to get some safety glasses, to ensure any future pictures are even more unflattering. Anyway, it’s fairly satisfying work when you look back over the bits you’ve done, and I’ve just had a text from Rae who says we can start putting clay on the walls later this week. That will feel like proper progress to me!

In other news, Barbara Next Door (as opposed to Barbara Straw Bales) has given us a front door and a thin mattress suitable for making the bed in the caravan actually comfortable. The mattress is salvaged from a foldaway couch bed; her son didn’t like the smell of it and had it replaced. The front door came off a house across the road and was replaced by a plastic one. I really don’t get that. It’s a lovely wooden door with a little diamond-shaped window and a knocker and a mail slot and the number 122 on it (*almost* tempted to keep that.) I might try to strip the orange-ish finish off it, depends on how difficult I find the test patch.

We’ve sort of been rained off, though we did persevere for a while through it. It just turns into such a morass up there in prolonged rain, because the soil is just 200 years’ worth of cultivation and leaf-fall. It’ll grow incredible vegetables, but it’s a pain in the tookus for walking over. As soon as it’s warranted, I’ll be paving a path in stone to and from the front door of this house.

Haven’t got any pictures, I’m afraid, though Alec took a few and I’ll post them later when he sends them. We did some compression, which involves putting ratchet straps round the walls, over top plate and below floor, and crunching it all down as hard as you can until it’s all uniformly squashed, and then nailing bits of wood in place to hold it there. It’s kind of amazing how much it does compress, but it leaves me confident that it won’t be settling any more after we move in.

We also borrowed some electricity from Harry and Peggy (the neighbours down the hill who used to run the flower nursery on the site) and did some wall-shaving with Rae’s alligator saw. It’s a little soul destroying at first, as you run over and over it and it seems to just pick out more bits with every pass, but actually, having got halfway along the wall and looked at the two sides in comparison, the shaved half did look really tidy and flat compared to the hairy half.

Anyway, we’ve given up for the first half of this week, as it’s just forecast to tip it down and blow it around incessently until Wednesday night. So we’ll head over there Thursday morning and hope that the whole place hasn’t blown away or disappeared under a mudslide.

Sigh.

I set off this morning at quarter to six to pick up a velux flashing kit I’d bought on eBay and head over to Liverpool to collect a scaffolding tower I’d bought. The forecast for this afternoon and evening is awful, including wind gusts of up to 48mph, so I decided to come to the land and at least be here to watch it all blow away. Here is the story so far, in bad things and good things.

Bad Thing: the weather in Liverpool, from which direction it was headed here, was ghastly. Buffeting, sudden wind gusts made driving a high-sided vehicle with a trailer quite exciting.

Good Thing: I got a great deal on just the flashing kit I needed, and a good deal on the right amount of scaffolding. And all the people involved were really helpful and nice.

Bad Thing: on arrival at the land, I got stuck on the really sharp bend with the trailer. And you know, in all the time, all summer, that I’ve been driving up and down that lane, I swear I’ve met anyone coming the other way about twice. Well, there were three of them this time.

Good Thing: among them were a very helpful couple from the house on the corner (whose names I don’t know yet) who very calmly got out and helped direct me to get unstuck.

Bad Thing: another guy honked his horn and gave me a cutting look (though at that point I’d delayed him by about a minute.)

Good Thing: the last one was a sweet, elderly lady from down the road who waited patiently and then shot me an enormous grin and thumbs up as she went past.

Bad Thing: here I am in the marquee, having now closed the zips that had worked their way open and re-pegged the pegs that had worked their way out, but in the gusts, I do wonder whether the whole thing is going to blow down on top of me.

Good Thing: the super-tarp over the straw building seems almost entirely unperturbed and the straw is bone dry.

Best thing: the milk I accidentally left in the “fridge ” (the shady side of the marquee) two days ago has not gone off and I can therefore have a cup of tea.