Timber!

Colin the tree surgeon (or Celtic Firs, to give him his official business name) came out and did his stuff, and it’s made a big difference to the amount of light in the garden and coming through the windows at the back of the house.

We have a nice load of firewood to take home and season 🙂

The trees at the back also got a trim.  The lower branches from the other big evergreen were extending around 6ft into the garden and once I get all the output from the chipping machine cleared away (could be a while…) it’s going to be a pretty big space.  All the brambles and blackcurrants have been cut back to the boundary as well.

Inside, Pete and Al have been hard at work.  The rest of the wall is down in the kitchen, all bricks and wood have been removed, and it’s swept out and tidy.

Upstairs the little fireplace has been removed.

If the little Victorian-style insert from Ethel’s doesn’t fit into this space, then I’ll get David to take that bit of plasterboard off, re-frame it and cover it over completely.

In the master bedroom, the hot water tank cupboard is gone.  Now there’s space for a 5ft double and two bedside cabinets.

Other news from the last couple of weeks – the boiler at Ethel’s stopped again, the day before the guests were due to arrive.  This time I consulted Google and found that the overheat light was coming on.  After leaving a message for Jeff on every form of contact details I have for him, including Facebook, I went down the road to feed the horses and saw his van parked outside a house further down the road.  He came and had a look and said that there were three usual causes of what was happening – 1) pressure drop (which I’d eliminated by resetting it the other day), 2) the pump had failed, meaning the water the boiler was heating up wasn’t getting moved out of the boiler and around the system (the pump was fine), 3) dodgy thermostat.  He found that the sensor for the thermostat had come slightly out of its insulated pocket, so re-seated it, fired it up and told me to monitor it.  Thankfully it’s been fine ever since, but I think we’re going to have to budget for a replacement boiler in the next 12 months, as even though Jeff said it probably had another two or three years in it before things started going wrong, I’d rather do it a bit early and not have any pissed-off guests.

We had a half-decent amount of snow here last week and sod’s law, one of the days with the heaviest fall overnight was the one where I had to go out to Coldbackie for a site visit with the plumber.  Yes, I finally have a plumber!  He has keys and will get started as soon as he can.  He’s made all sorts of sensible suggestions about bathroom layout and saved me an entire shower cubicle.  We’ve measured out the en-suite width upstairs and I’ve written on the wall to show David where the new stud wall needs to go.  I was going to do all the ordering through his account with the local plumbing merchant in Thurso, but while I was browsing through the Heritage bathroom catalogue, looking for an appropriately-period-style suite for the new bathroom, I found a website with a January sale on the entire range.  Kris told me to order from it, as he wouldn’t be able to price-match, so he’ll get all the en-suite goods and the replacement downstairs loo and shower through his account, and I’ve got £800 off on the upstairs suite, which is 10% of the entire bathrooms budget.  The one I’ve picked is Granley Deco, which is 1930s, same as the extension.

RDI went back out yesterday and got the heating working again.  I need to give them a ring to find out where we are, because they were going to do the radiator move as well and I can see today that they’ve moved the temperature control to the new position and put the two isolation valves on, but there’s a big wet patch on the concrete floor and the radiator is still under the kitchen window, so I’m not sure whether they simply ran out of time, as I know I was down as an afternoon job, or if they hit a problem.  A relief that the house is warm again though, although I’d turned the water off as a precaution while it was off.  It doesn’t half look pretty out there in the snow though, even if driving around snowy unploughed roads is a bit hairy – view from the front bedroom last Tuesday.

Finally we’re getting going

It seems like I’ve spent most of the last eight months we’ve owned Tor Aluinn bashing my head against various walls, but with the turn of the year I’m faintly hopeful that we might be moving forwards again.  Colin the tree surgeon arrived on New Year’s Day (yes, I know!) to take a look at the trees in the back garden.  He agreed with me that the massive pine next to the house with the electricity cable running through its branches needed to come down completely and suggested he trim and balance the other large pine and tidy up the remaining trees.  Even better, he also does other landscaping and garden works, so I asked him to quote me for sorting out the bramble and blackcurrant overgrowth, getting the lawn under control and generally sorting the whole garden out – two of his guys can do in a day what will take me about a month of stomping around in waterproofs and swearing!  The really good thing is that he is trained and insured to take trees down by climbing them, which means no heavy machinery on my neighbour’s beautifully-mown paths through the grass outside my boundary.  The trees and brambles are being worked on tomorrow, which was the earliest date SSE could give us for getting someone out to turn the mains cable off, and then I think the rest of the garden will be done a bit later in the year, after I’ve taken the tree trunk off site (he could dispose of it for us, but asked if I wanted it cut into manageable lengths to burn, which should give us a fair amount of firewood).

I went out there today to leave some keys for him in case he needed to get into the house and to my delight Pete and Al had made it out to start knocking through downstairs.  It’s going to be a fabulous big room and it better balances out the huge living room at the other end of the house.

The other end of the room doesn’t look quite so tidy.

There’s still a bit of wall left to come down – Pete’s van is in for servicing tomorrow (which is handy, because we’ll have both Colin and SSE taking up the parking places), but they’ll be back on Friday to finish this off.

And, most handily, where they’ve taken out the poured concrete skirting, there’s a nice access point to undernearth the floorboards, exactly where Chris will need to get into to run power to the kitchen island.

The less good news was that the boiler had stopped working.  We ran out of oil while we were away on holiday, so I got a delivery as soon as we were back, repressurised the boiler, hit the reset button and all seemed well.  I was slightly suspicious that it had turned itself off again last time I was out, but the thermostat was reading 9C (it’s on the Eco setting and should be maintaining at 10C) and I shrugged it off as it not having hit the boundary temperature to fire up again.  Today I checked the pressure, hit reset and although the boiler sprang into life, it didn’t make the WHUMPH noise that indicates it’s fired up and promptly switched itself off again.  I spoke to RDI and they’ll be out to look at it as soon as possible – it probably needs bleeding and they need to replace the dodgy non-return valve they found on their last vist.  We were going to wait to move that radiator until Pete and Al had sorted the wall, but I’ve said if they’re coming out, we might as well go back to the original plan of putting two isolation valves on it and letting Pete take it off the wall when he’s ready, then RDI can cross this job off their books.  They’re also going to test the emissions, as my neighbour has mentioned he can smell it very strongly when it fires, although that may simply be because it doesn’t have a garage around it any more.  (It’s been a bad day for boilers, the one at Ethel’s had stopped as well, but I managed to fix that one – pressure drop due to cold weather.  I’ve got guests arriving on Friday, so I’m hoping that’s all it is!)

As well as speaking to RDI today I’ve also rung a new plumber, as I’ve never heard anything more from the one who said they’d come and look at the job back in October, despite a few gentle nudges.  I got their voicemail, but they were recommended by my neighbour at home’s parents and they only live about 5 miles from the house, so I’m hoping that a nice chunky job close to home will be appealing.  Fingers crossed.  I also gave Chris the electrician a ring to see where I’d got to on his list and he’s hoping to start if not next week then probably the week after.  We’ve decided not to move the meter and consumer unit, I’ll get David to build me a nice small cupboard around them, as they’re not the prettiest.

I know it’s a bit early to start thinking about finishing touches, but I couldn’t resist a bit of shopping over Christmas.  Serendipity in Thurso got this beautiful slate house name made for me:

And then I hit Riverside Interiors for their January sale.  The Jude chair that I wanted for the living room was in it – at that much of a discount I’ll take the risk of the second one I’ll need to order not quite being the same shade of brown.  I’m having a pair of these in the bay window in the living room, looking out over the islands.

This footstool is also for the living room, but the other end, where the two big sofas and the TV are going.

Lighting was 20% off, so this will go between the sofas as a reading lamp.

And finally, this wasn’t a planned purchase, but I fell in love with it (oops).  If there’s enough room to get it into the corner in the porch behind the front door it’ll go there.  If not, it’ll go into the utility room, opposite the back door.  The perfect boot-removing seat.

Hopefully I can get back to some more regular updates over the next few months.  I think our planned target of finishing by the end of May is optimistic, but that’s not going to stop us trying.

Racing for the line

I had an email today from our first guest!  Thanks to a bit of a booking mix-up, she actually wanted to stay 1st to 5th March instead of 4th to 8th – would it be possible to swap?  I said yes, but warned her we might not be completely 100% finished with the landscaping, which she was fine with, and then went into full on strategic planning mode!

Fortunately Mick has done an amazing job this week.  At the start of the week, the bathroom still looked like a building site.  This is what it looked like this afternoon:

All that’s left to do is seal round the shower, grout the slates on the windowsill and swap the plastic toilet seat for the oak one we bought, the rest is just set dressing.

Jeff, our heating engineer and plumber, came to have a look at the basin, which had a small leak somewhere (it turned out to be spiralling down the thread of the u-bend) and service the boiler.  I have never before in my life seen a man take a boiler to pieces and then hoover cobwebs out of the various components!  It’s now testing at 94% efficiency, which is excellent for its age, and should last at least another year.  We did have a chuckle when we realised we’d both turned up in the same outfit 😉

The weather has been beautiful today, so along with helping me take a big bale of hay down to the horses and bringing the sheep up to Ethel’s, using the little garden gate as a shedder to separate out the ones having twins, keeping them up here for feeding and putting the rest back out on the point, Mick has been sorting out the front garden.  Ever since the gravel went down, the gate has dragged on the ground and it’s been difficult to locate the hole for the bolt, so a few inches has been sawn off the bottom of the gate, the bolt moved up and a stone set in the ground with a hole drilled in it.  It now all works perfectly.

All the grass has been strimmed back.  The centre section is going to be a patio area made from the old flags that were outside the front door.  The grassy area to the left was going to be where we rebuilt Ethel’s rock garden, but it’s a much bigger area, so the rock garden is being used to edge round both grass sections and then I’m going to sow wildflower seeds in both bits when the weather warms up and try and get a sort of wildflower meadow effect going, with poppies and cornflowers and ox-eye daisies and so on.  Fairly low maintenance in that it just gets strimmed back once the flowers have set seed!

I’ve been inside, working on door frames.  David had to plane them back to get the doors to fit properly which, of course, took the white paint off, so I’ve been carefully repainting them and using several miles of masking tape in an effort not to paint any oak or hinges.  They’re all done and I’ve touched up all the spots the roller missed on the bedroom and living room walls.  I’m off south tomorrow to see (a) Erasure at the Hammersmith Apollo and (b) my mum 🙂 so Mick has been left with a short list of things from my snagging list that are jobs he is far better at than I am, and the rest I should be able to get done Monday to Wednesday next week.  I desperately need Pete to come and commission the woodburner as at the moment it still has a bucket behind it, and David needs to come back for another look at the door he built for the understairs cupboard – the flipping underfloor heating has warped it and it won’t shut, so I can’t paint it until it’s sorted!

One door closes, another opens

Very sadly the house we’ve been in the process of trying to buy for the past 5 months has fallen through, so bang goes the idea of our current house becoming holiday lets two and three.  However, in that weird way the universe has of sometimes saying, ‘Don’t give up,’ the same day that I found out it definitely wouldn’t be going ahead, I also got given a new opportunity.  A friend of mine has a house she lets to tenants, who moved out last week.  She’s had a couple of hassles with various sets of tenants in the past and is so busy at the moment that she doesn’t really want to have the headache of finding new ones and settling them in.  She’d really like short-term holiday let tenants, but definitely doesn’t have the time to sort that.

Well, I can recognise a ball lobbed in my direction occasionally 😉 so I asked if she would be interested in giving me a 5-year commercial lease to run it as a holiday let.  She’s going to discuss it with her other half and then we’ll have a proper talk through the idea when I’m back from a week away with my mother and I can have a look inside, though if it’s anything like her other properties it’ll be immaculate.  The cottage itself is in a spectacular location, on its own on a headland, overlooking the sea, but from memory it doesn’t have an enclosed garden and I suspect she wouldn’t want dogs in the house anyway, which will limit income.

I think steps forward with this are, assuming friend is still interested in pursuing the idea after talking with her husband:

  1. Have a look inside.
  2. Make notes of what I think might need changing based on what I learned from the holiday cottage rep (e.g. I’m pretty certain it’s set up as two twin rooms, so one would need changing to a double)
  3. Ask holiday cottage rep for income estimation
  4. Crunch numbers

My very rough back-of-an-envelope calculations give an average monthly profit of £150-£250, which I was a bit sniffy about, because I was comparing it to Ethel’s, but then I thought about it and if someone offered me £200 a month for about 16 hours’ work I’d take it.

I’ve stalled a bit down the road, as David’s vanished again.  He asked me a week ago Friday if I minded if he did some work in his neighbour’s kitchen on Monday, but he’d be back, and I haven’t seen him since!  Dougie is back from Borneo, but I don’t feel I can chase him up until I’ve got the last two ceilings finished.  The twin bedroom and the landing are now mostly sanded down, just a few bits to go over where we touched up some sunken plaster, but I’m not sure I’ll have time to get them painted before I go away.

I also had a visit from Jeff this week.  Jeff’s a semi-retired heating engineer from Birmingham and a genius with boilers, but Ethel’s nearly defeated him on Monday.  The hot water wasn’t working, so Jeff dismantled various bits of the system and found that the paddle switch was working as it should be and the pressure switch was activating the pump correctly, but for some reason the boiler itself wasn’t firing up to provide heat.  There was a considerable amount of head-scratching going on until he took the casing off the circuit board and the mystery was solved.  Because John and Ethel had always run their hot water from the old Rayburn in the kitchen, the people who installed the boiler had completely removed the switching on the circuit board for it!  It can be sorted, but Jeff has been honest and said it’s way outside his comfort zone and he’d be happier if Dougie did it, so that’s another one for his list when he’s next here.  Once that’s up and running again, Jeff will come and service the boiler, because he reckons it hasn’t ever been done since it was installed.

David did manage to get a fair bit done in the three days he was with us.  The finished kitchen window seat – I was in town today and called in at the local haberdasher, who say they’ll be able to make me seat cushions for this if I make them a template for each end.

Knobs and handles fitted in the kitchen.  That blue isn’t quite so in your face with the units toning it down, so I think we might keep it.

Fireplace surround complete and skirting board started.

Well, well, well…

Progress!  Not one, not two, but three pieces of good news to report.

Firstly, I had a recorded delivery letter from the Crofting Commission to say that my application to decroft the house and garden site has been granted.  I am chuffed to bits that (a) it’s gone through in about six weeks (it can take up to four months) and (b) it’s gone through first time.  Reading through the order, which is signed and stamped with a very official-looking red seal, it doesn’t come into effect until I’ve actually bought the land from my landlord, after which I send a form back to the Commission to say it’s been done and then the property gets entered onto the Registers of Scotland as freehold and becomes mortgageable.  I’ve emailed SGRPID, as the representatives of my landlord (the Scottish Ministers) and they’ve forwarded my enquiry to the correct person, so now I just have to wait for them to get back to me on what I do next.

Secondly, Derek and Dougie have both been on site today and we NEARLY have a central heating system.  It would have been up and running today but for two things – Derek wanted to double-check what we were doing with the drain for the shower and the flue plate has dropped off the boiler and needs welding back on.  So he’ll be back tomorrow with a welder he knows and, fingers crossed, we should have a big switch-on tomorrow at some point.  It’s looking good though.

Sitting room heating layed and covered for walking on.

One of the individual room thermostats.  These can all be set to different temperatures and are programmable.

The manifold is nearly full and Dougie has fitted a master control panel.  David’s going to build us a slim cupboard the length of the landing to hide all this – I was hoping to use the rest of it for spare bed linen, but I don’t think there’s going to be any spare space!!

Last but not least, the land is slowly being renovated as well.  When we were making hay in the summer, John Angie told me that there was a natural well on the slope down to the little cove, but a landslip had covered it a few years back.  He showed me roughly where it was, but I didn’t get round to having a proper look.  Then a neighbour mentioned it again last night, so yesterday I climbed down and went in search of it.

I could hear the water running and soon found what looked like a shallow muddy puddle in the right place.  I kicked a bit of the silt out with my boot and it filled itself up again – bingo.

So this morning I strapped a spade to the back of the quad bike and after I’d fed the sheep, I dug away until I hit rock, using the silt to make a dam at the front – John said he had a piece of stone at the front, but it got taken out by the landslip, although I think I’ve found a corner of it sticking out of the ground a couple of metres below the well and may be able to dig it out.

I left it to fill and when I went back down to the sheep this evening it had topped itself up.  Add one old saucepan and that’s an end to the problems of filling water buckets all the way out on the point 🙂

The jigsaw puzzle

It’s struck me today that project managing this is a little bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle.  You find the odd piece or two that go together and gradually you work out how it all fits together.

The heating engineer came round this afternoon and delivered the good news that (a) the boiler is a combi boiler and (b) it’s in pretty good shape and doesn’t need replacing.  Hooray!  The hot water feed from it hasn’t been connected up, seems that Ethel and John simply used the Rayburn and the hot water cylinder upstairs, which means that’s a closed circuit and we can simply disconnect it from the header tank, drain it and take it all out.  Does mean I have to find another use for my saved mirrored door, but I’m glad of the extra space in the bedroom.

So I’m starting to piece the timetable together like a logic problem.  Pete is replacing the roof and needs the joiner (who’s the only major trade I’ve not yet spoken to) to enlarge the existing Veluxes and cut the new ones, which will depend on us having stripped the panelling in the relevant areas.  He’ll also need the stonework person to patch the harling into the spots where the fascia boards are being removed, who’ll also need to patch up the spot where the electrician is moving the mains power cable.  The electrician needs to work with the joiner if any cabling needs running up the new studwork behind the plasterboard.  The heating engineer needs to put the underfloor heating down and install the woodburner and hearth before the joiner lays the wood floors.  The joiner is the one we’re going to need the most flexibility from, I think, in terms of popping back and forth.  Fortunately he’s the one who lives closest!