A Sustainable House in Kintyre
Actually, we have been back for almost a month but haven’t had a great deal to show for it until now.
It was great to see Jo and John and the rest of trip was just fantastic, much better than we imagined. The Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Melbourne, Tasmania, Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef, the Himalayan foothills for John and a Tai Chi pilgrimage to some amazing places in China for me. It was almost a tour of world heritage sites. But that’s another story.
We enjoyed a nice break in the Yorkshire Dales where it was cold but dry and we were able to go walking every day. Coming back, while being very pleased with everything we had accomplished before Christmas, it was a bit of a shock and actually a bit depressing to see how little is actually finished and off the list. Continue reading “Another Deadline”
Since the windows have gone in John has been doing the boring, fiddly but very important bits fixing them properly and filling in the edges with insulation and tape, generally doing the airtight bit.
Quite a few things are happening all of a sudden. Keith and Darren delivered the kitchen from Ikea on the 18th of October at exactly the time agreed. It took them a mere 20 minutes to unload 119 items and bring them into the house across the bridge into the utility room. Continue reading “The Silence of the Windows”
Our main activity this last month has been fitting the windows and lifting the potatoes, most of which were rotting in the ground or else rotting once we got them out as we had nowhere to dry them – that is until I remembered we actually have a house. Continue reading “A ‘Retro’ View of the World”
According to the Met Office, it has been the 9th wettest August in Scotland and the dullest since records began.
You might know it. School holidays and the weather has been much wetter. We have managed to finish the cladding on the north wall and have got the base coats of render on. What a difference! It really looks like a house.
Coming back from Tai Chi Caledonia was as exciting as expected. Still on a high, I found that John had just about got all the floors down, Merry Mick had finished the utility roof and architect Chris had been for a visit without throwing up his hands in horror. He pronounced the house ‘gloriously ramshackle’ referring (we think!) to the patches of polythene and tarpaulin over the windows.
Another month. My the weeks are passing! Everything seems to marking time but Mick has started slating and the first instalment of larch cladding has finally arrived. It is going on the wall very nicely. The diffutherm order, the insulated wall panels that will be rendered, turned up late and incomplete but we should be able to get cracking on that once the cladding is up.
