Monthly Archives: July 2016

Progress update

July 31, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged byres, ridge tiles, roof, slating, studwork Leave a comment

It’s been a week of steady progress. This afternoon Mick and I went down and finished clearing out the byre. The hay might still be on the ground getting steadily wetter, but at least we have somewhere to put it and Ronald, who I’ve been told is one of the best hay makers in the area and lives opposite Ethel’s House, has reassured me that I haven’t lost it yet, I just need to hold my nerve. The byre looks an awful lot better, anyway.

I found this under several years of dirt on the floor – hopefully it’s a good omen!

I also have an update on the two photographs. I tagged a couple of neighbours on Facebook to see if they had any idea and someone tagged a relative of Ethel’s, who very kindly messaged me with this:

Hello , I believe you have purchased ,my late mothers family home ,used to love going there for my holidays late forties early fifties .the photo of the man you found , is my late maternal grandfather , Hugh MacDonald , he died very young , in his thirties , possibly around 1910 era ( burst appendix ) leaving my granny with three young children ,and pregnant with the fourth , my late uncle Harry .we are not sure who the lady in photograph is , but think it may be my fathers sister Ina . If you find any more photos could be interesting .

So that means one of those photos is possibly over 100 years old – incredible! I’m going to see if my Photoshop skills are good enough to retouch them, if not I may get it professionally done. I’d like to get the originals and cleaned-up copies put in one frame to hang in the house. The Uncle Harry referred to was Ethel’s husband.

Travis Perkins were supposed to deliver the ridge tiles on Wednesday, but rang Pete to say their crane was being inspected, so it would be Thursday. Turned out there was a fault on the crane, which was fixed on Thursday, but then the lorry came west without our order on it. They said they’d bring it on Friday, but had to go to Wick first, so Pete hooked up his trailer and went to get it himself. Of course, it promptly rained, but they did manage to make a start and Mick has been up the scaffolding to get some close-up photos of our beautiful, beautiful roof.

The chimneys will be re-pointed, but we’re going to leave that stone in-fill detail visible.

In even better news, David managed to give us a day, so we have some studwork going in upstairs.

More clearing out

July 27, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House Tagged baking, byres, electrician, house history, power Leave a comment

As I need somewhere to store the hay I’m hopefully going to be baling on Thursday or Friday, this week I’m concentrating my efforts on clearing out the biggest of the byres, which will apparently hold 250 square bales when it’s empty. It’s the one we’ve been storing all the wood we stripped out in:

Behind that piece of framework is an old electric cooker, which I found a load of nearly-new muffin trays and casserole dishes inside, and behind the hot water cylinder was the carcass of chest of drawers – in the one remaining drawer, I found these:

I’m asking around to find out who they were. It’s looking like the man is Hugh MacDonald (who I think was Ethel’s father-in-law and my neighbour Christopher’s uncle), but no-one has yet identified the lady.

Whilst shifting some of the wood pile, I found another dated board. This was on the underside of one of the shelves we took out of the kitchen pantry:

And this week’s cake? Well, on Monday night Pete announced that since a packet of Silk Cut had reached £10 in the village shop, he was giving up smoking, so I thought I’d better come up with something a bit spectacular!

I’ve had the quote through from SSE Power Distribution for moving the overhead line and it’s come back at a very reasonable £194.28. I forwarded it to Dougie for him to check that they’d included everything he needed, and he rang back this evening to say (a) it was fine, go ahead and (b) he was nearly non-contagious again and hoping to get up to us for a day this week.

Where did the weekend go?

July 24, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Finances, Renovations Tagged budget, credit card, patterns, roof, scallops, slating Leave a comment

It seems it was Friday only about two seconds ago! This is where the roofing team got to on Friday afternoon:

You can’t see it very well on the picture (click on it to enlarge), but there are four scalloped diamonds on the roof, spaced in between the windows. Pete suggested that we do a line of scallops connecting them as well, to echo the one at the ridge line. I was expecting the diamonds to be three slates wide, as per my original drawing – if you want a laugh…:

they’ve actually gone for four and we may have overcooked it slightly, but I think it only looks a bit overdone at the moment because the rest of the outside isn’t finished. Once the house is painted a warm white with a dark green front door, a couple of dark green planters with colourful flowers either side, a new fence and new gate, it might well be just right.

Of course, the fact that the front is nearly finished means that I’m going to have to write another big cheque soon, as the second of the three payments is due on completion of slating. My credit card bill for the insulation and flooring arrived last week (1% cashback on that card!) and when I logged in to pay it, I was slightly alarmed to see that I had no money transfer or balance transfer offers available – there’s been one on that card every month for at least the last three years. I still have one available on my other card from the same provider, which I will take up next week, but this card has a £12,000 limit and not being able to access that is going to leave quite a big hole in the budget.

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A plague on both your houses!

July 20, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged crofting, haymaking, renovation, roof, scalloped, slates Leave a comment

I got a call from Dougie the electrician yesterday. “Sorry I haven’t been up this week,” he said. “I’ve managed to catch ringworm and I’m trying not to go near people as I’m very contagious.” He’ll be back with us next week, but in the meantime he’s been talking me through filling out the online SSE form to get someone out to have a look at the house and tell me how much it’s going to cost to move the incoming power cable and the meter. All submitted and they should get back to me in three working days, so fingers crossed it’s not going to be too expensive. Dougie did get a fair bit done last week, we have another couple of holes in the house, one in the living room where the power cable will go out for a switch for the two floodlights that will illuminate the sheep fanks and one where the new mains power will come in. The current one is only hanging on by the skin of its teeth!

Actually, it’s no bad thing that he’s not here, because he really needs an accurate drawing of the kitchen units and it hasn’t been done yet. Mick has a colleague at work who used to work for a kitchen company and still has the design software, so she’s very kindly doing it for us (I’ve asked him to find out what kind of cake she likes!). David’s also been back working on his neighbour’s extension, so it’s just been Pete and his team working on the roof.

The sarking boards are all replaced where necessary and the slates are now going on. James has set up a small slate-cutting workshop in the kitchen to hand-cut all the scalloped slates for the ridge row and the patterns.

David realised he hadn’t asked us for enough wood, so the Rembrand lorry came trundling over with another 30 lengths and the guys now have a nice bench to sit and have lunch on.

There are some replacement floorboards on the way from Allans of Gillock as well, but they’ve been a bit delayed due to the county show last weekend throwing out their delivery schedule.

Tomorrow I have to turn my attention to the fields again – we are forecast dry weather from tomorrow until Sunday afternoon, so John Angy and his tractor are coming up tomorrow afternoon to cut this little lot for me and hopefully we’ll get it turned on Friday and Saturday and baled on Sunday. That’s the plan, anyway, let’s hope the weather gods are kind! It also means I have until Sunday to clear enough space in the byres to store the baled hay with enough air around it for it not to combust and go up in flames. I suspect I’m in for some hard physical labour for the rest of the week!

Time to hit the accelerator

July 10, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged dormer, highland, house, leaks, renovation, roof, sarking boards, skews 1 Comment

Last week it looked like not much happened. In fact, an awful lot did, but as seems to be the theme with this project, it’s all background preparation that won’t be on display when the house is the finished.

Pete and his team moved onto the front of the roof and hit some issues. Apparently most roofers will start with the back of the house, because it gives you a good idea of what to expect, there are generally fewer features to deal with, and it gives you a chance to get a feel for the roof and get into the swing of how it slates so when you come round to the front there should be no nasty surprises. That’s how Pete’s always done it and it’s served him very well. My roof, however, decided to be difficult. So since Pete had very sweetly bought me my own hard hat (apparently I have to write BOSS on it in permanent marker!) I got my brave pants on (I don’t do heights) and went up for a look.

The roof, as is traditional round here, has cement skews (the vertical slabs you can see at each end of the roof on pictures of it). Now, if you’re a sensible roofer, you slate under the skew a little bit so there’s no gap that water can get into. Remember when we took off all the panelling in the bedrooms and found that the gable ends were running wet and thought it was the chimneys? It wasn’t…

Yes, those sarking boards are absolutely rotten. To add to that, it seems that no-one had ever bothered to take the previous liners off – they had to remove eight layers of tar paper and some of the old asbestos cement tiles (which would have been the cause of the diamond pattern you can see in this layer).

And then they got to the dormers. Now, you’d think that it might be sensible to use the same width of skew on the top of the dormer as the sides, right? Apparently not.

This is causing Pete all types of headache, because that tiny little triangle of wood behind the vertical skew needs making watertight somehow. It was previously slated, but the slates bulged out where they met the cement and it had just been packed with mortar to try and keep the rain out, which hadn’t worked (we did wonder why we pulled out a few old towels from behind the panelling in one of the bedrooms!). He’s currently thinking he might just do some fancy leadwork there instead, but was considering his options over the weekend, so may have a clearer idea tomorrow.

As the sarking boards were tinder-dry, Pete asked me if I could take a wander down about 9pm and just check that the house wasn’t on fire, because they’d been using diamond-tipped blades on the skews (they wore out two doing the back of the house!) and although they’d soaked everything in water before starting, sparks had been flying and he wanted to make sure one hadn’t smouldered. No smoke and no flames, but a rather beautiful evening.

Over the weekend, Mick got up on the scaffolding and started cleaning the old paint off the dormers in preparation for painting them.

He found a green layer, which might have been a primer or they might once have been green, which makes me happy, because I’ve gone for a green front door and will have green gates 🙂 Rain stopped play before he could do much on the second one, so here’s the comparison shot:

Good view from up there, but no whales today, sadly.

The really great news is that we have David the joiner tomorrow! I’m not sure how many days we’ve got him for, but quite frankly I’ll take what he can give me and be grateful at the moment. He asked us if we’d got timber already, which we hadn’t, but obviously getting it ourselves would save on his time and we have an account at the same place he would have got it from, so Mick was dispatched into town with the truck to buy what David needed. Turns out you can’t get 24 lengths of 3×2 on top of a Mitsubishi L200… 12 left it bouncing in a rather spectacular manner, even on its toughened suspension, so Mick had two rather careful drives home and now as well as all the insulation and floor packed into the living room, we have 24 lengths of wood in the hall.

The plan was that David would start upstairs with the front Velux for Pete, then do the framing for Dougie to run cables into. Mick and I would fit insulation in the evenings, thus gradually emptying out the living room for David to work in. Which would have worked beautifully if it wasn’t for the fact that Mick is away from Tuesday to Friday! I think what we’ll do is just move the insulation panels into the rooms they’ll be installed in as David finishes each one, which will hopefully free up enough space for him to work round.

In theory, we should have five on site tomorrow – do you think we’ve catered enough?? It’s getting like the Great British Bake-Off in our kitchen at weekends!