Snug as bugs

Saturday 30 November 2013

We got the plywood to finish the partition on Thursday, but had to go do boaty things, then on Friday we had to go to Lefkas to get door furniture for Rowan to finish the door - he's making it off site in his workshop, so it wasn't until Saturday that the panels went in and Dave decided the plaster was dry enough to cover with textiles and re-yurt our space.  The textiles make it seem much cosier, cut out the cold coming through the walls and add a little air barrier for insulation.  It worked for medieval castles with their tapestries, so it'll do for us.

 

In the Nick of Time

Weds 27 November 2013

Today we could feel the change in temperature.  It's cold.  You can see your breath in the air.  Not good when living in a field.  So, the final push to finish the bedroom ...

 The sun came out - always welcome, especially with a rainbow (the pot of gold is our house!) but with the cloud cover gone, it's cold.  Snow visible on the mainland mountains.

 Yesterday I finished the partition framework - waiting for plywood from Lefkas.  Rowan has agreed to make us doors - the main door and little doors for this cupboard, should be ready around the weekend.

 Dave got several panels plastered on Tuesday, after I'd skived off to art.  The triangles and the letterbox shape below have been left for electric sockets and heating pipes to be fitted in due course

 By lunchtime wednesday - with both of us plastering all morning, Dave finished the final corner - super double hurrah!  For the record, my panels are the triangles around the window and the parallelogram by Dave's waist

 

 And without loss of time, we moved in the bed, the sofa and the heater, and hung bedspreads over the door space.  The plaster is still wet, but it won't dry at low temperatures, and we can't spare the heater, so we put all the furniture about a foot in from the walls and huddled around the fire in our bed robes.  In the night, one of the cats crept in and climbed over Dave's head, waking him suddenly - he flung it away, and we now have paw prints in the plaster on that side.

But otherwise, we had a very warm and snug night under our mountain of bedclothes, and much quieter than we're used to.

Racing the cold

Monday 25 November 2013

Everyone's saying the weather will turn cold this week, so we're working on the bedroom as hard as the rain allows.  We've been doing the woodwork trims around the tops and bottoms of the walls, and building the partition across the bottom of the room that will allow us to insulate on that side.

 We put in the pale wood on the diagonal - to join the new wall to the joist, to have an edge to plaster to.  Up behind the joist is stuffed with pillow innards for insulation.

 Building the partition walls to form a cupboard where the roof gets too low and Dave keeps banging his head.  This had to wait until we had plaster on the side walls before we could start the partition.  It will be plywood stuffed with pillows.  We can't plaster that wall because it faces south, where we intend to use cob and will need access at both sides.  So this partition idea gives us more storage (with polythene stapled across the back) and an insulated bedroom wall.

The biggest plaster panel done.  It took a whole mix and lots of arm ache.  The finish is deliberately rough, as we are only putting on a base coat.  The top coat can wait as long as necessary, we just need windproof solid walls at the moment.

Old rope

The lime plaster mix requires fibres, about an inch long, that help to bind the plaster to the mesh that we've fixed over the laths.  We haven't been able to find any ready made fibres, so Dave came up with cutting up old rope from the boat.  You slice it longways and then pull it apart.  It deconstructs into perfect little fibres that can be strewn into the mix as it tumbles.

Getting plastered

Friday 22 November 2013

Finally, on Friday, the room was mostly constructed, although we had run out of laths before we could finish the outside of the internal walls (we wanted these done because we don't want to be hammering laths onto the other side of already plastered walls - in case the plaster falls off - but we'll have to use screws now, instead).  During a break in the weather Dave made the first lime plaster mix, and got started ...

 First panel.  Dave caught in the process of standing up

 The big panels - the internal walls

 Moving on, getting the technique right on some small panels first

 Meanwhile - it's raining and raining and raining - Dave making mixes between cloudbursts, then we try to trundle the wheelbarrow into the entry via a seesawing plank - lots of fun!

Our water feature outside the front door - for some reason the roofers decided this was a good place for a hole in the guttering and no downpipe.

Building a nest

Tues - Thurs 19 - 21 November 2013

The week after Albania we spent lathing and lathing till we ran out of laths.  Dave had stepped off a kerb that wasn't there and jolted his back, so he couldn't do any heavy lifting - we couldn't even play with the new scaffolding tower that had arrived (flat packed) just before we left.  We stuck it in the camper van for security.  It takes two of us to get it out again and carry it down to the site, so it remains in its packaging, locked away, obstructing access to everything remaining in the camper.

The weather is creeping colder and colder.  Time is running out.  The temporary bedroom at the east end of the mezzanine is just thin textiles and sailcloth on three sides, and open insect netting on the other - it is exactly the same temperature as the surrounding field.  This will not be tenable any longer within a matter of days.

Our temporary accommodation.

So we sawed and drilled and nailed and prepped the proposed (enclosed) bedroom at the west end, ready to start plastering.  It hasn't stopped tipping down since we returned - it's going to be a challenge to make plaster mixes in this weather.

Albania Trip 2013 Dancing

Saturday 16 Nov 20130..

 The day was overcast, but spectacular from our balcony.

 We weren't too bothered to run around being touristy, and spent the day exploring the town and beach and stopping for coffee at intervals.  We found this roman ruin of an arch on the beach, and admired it's lime mortar and stonework, proving that we have become lime mortar bores and should have brought our anoracs.

 In the hotel restaurant in the evening, a few of us attempted to equal George's lemon-catching skill.  Failing to succeed with a small water glass, the way George does, we moved on up to this ice bucket and eventually a large casserole pot, but still with indifferent success!

 Group photo.  That's me right at the back, Dave seated next to me on the left

.

   Sue and Robbie opened the entertainment with Dave's accompaniment

 and then the dancing started.  Apart from the few moments when I took pictures, I think I didn't stop dancing all night.  Hopefully not too many of the pictures (and even worse - videos!) made it onto Facebook.

Our Albanian hosts, also enjoying the evening, in fact, granddad on the right was having so much fun he had to be politely restrained from dancing with any more of the women.

Albania Trip 2013 Travelling

 Friday to Sunday 15 - 17 Nov 2013

After a week of lathing, and other neglected tasks around the place, we reckoned we needed a break, and signed up for Ola Kala George's weekend trip to Albania.  This may have been a mistake ...

 Robbie  (in the shadows to the left) outside Greek exit customs, getting his passport double-checked - he may have been a bit too cheeky with the official ...

 The rest of the party, settled in for the wait

 Stopped at a mountain village for a late lunch at George's wife's sister's restaurant, where an ancient monster truck was discovered ...

 ... providing lots of interest for the engineers in the party,

 and even I had a play!

 After lunch drinks, before we headed on to Saranda, and our (really very posh, 

if extremely cheap) hotel,

where the sun set over a lonely fisherman just outside our window

Dancing

13 Nov 2013

The Art Party girls decided we would try out a little workshop in Lefkas called Dance Movement Therapy - based on Jungian Psychology and movement, it was a fun evening out with lots of activity, much fun, if a little tiring for my overworked back.

All walled up

Saturday 9 November 2013 at 3.30 pm

Finished!  Well, not finished, but done enough to progress on to the next stage of the straw bale wall build, putting in a wooden base and framing out the doors and windows.  We've asked Constantine to get the wood for us, but are still waiting for the cost, so we can get the money to him.  But the wall will need a while to dry anyway - the colder, damp nights are keeping the mortar from going off too soon - which is good for the wall, if not what we're used to.

We've been incredibly lucky with the weather, it has held good until today - from tomorrow the rains are due, so we have finished in the nick of time. 

There's plenty to do under cover while we wait for the wood.  We need to get money to Constantine, and get more laths to keep building the internal walls.  It's hard to know what is more urgent now - whether to get on with providing the whole house with the north straw bale wall, or concentrate on making a snug lath and plaster bedroom before the weather gets cold. 

The camper van is damp, and without us there to heat it from time to time, it's not a good place for storage, especially of clothes, so our clothes are still in their summer location stacked up in the shed, which means there's no possibility of putting the wood stove on in there.  As soon as the bedroom is lathed up and plastered on the inside, it will be a finished space, and we can move in properly: put the mattress up on a bed frame, build a wardrobe, buy chests of drawers - all the normal furniture people take for granted - and move the clothes, so we can heat the bathroom-shed.  We can also run a little gas fire in the bedroom, for heating when the evenings get cold, hey ho - lots to do.

Flowers of the field

Thurs/Fri 7 & 8 Nov 2013

Only a last few rocks left at the delivery site, the ones that rolled down the slope under the tree and are too awkward to move.

Meanwhile, the wall has swallowed up the pipes, and is very close to completion.

 But with so few small and mid-sized stones I'm spending half the time scouring the land for rubble, and wheelbarrowing it back to the build site.  (Dave has been dragged away to move boats again - it's that time of year).  On one trip back with a loaded barrow, I found myself suddenly in among these little crocii, which have sprung up overnight in the delivery truck tracks - not a good survival instinct.  Luckily we don't have any more deliveries planned for a while.

Notso, the last remaining chicken, unimpressed by the crocii

 A day later, when the sun came out, the flowers were basking.  Not sure if they are saffron crocus - and not much of a crop even if they were.

Pipeworx

5 -6 November 2013

Tuesday we just had to do some sorting out: housekeeping, washing, shopping, checking the boat - all the stuff we'd let go while we had Rob's extra pair of hands.  And, we'd run out of supplies, so on Wednesday morning, while Dave was called in to do some boat hauling for friends, I organised a delivery.  Now that all the stones have been moved round, the truck could get right up to the mixer to dump the sand and lime right on the spot where we need it - hallelujah!

The mixer, looking strangely festive in the sunshine, with the first of four big bags of sand.

 The wall has now reached the kitchen sink waste pipe, which needed plumbing in before it could be built into the wall.  And at the last minute, we realised that as the utility room - designed to be built out on the little terrace to the left of the pic below - had been left off the plans (not sure why), would not be able to be built for quite some time, we would therefore need to put a washing machine waste pipe in too.  (They couldn't be the same pipe, as we want to reuse our laundry water for irrigation, while the kitchen sink water is too full of grease and needs to go into the soakaway.  So there were two pipe outlets to be fixed up.

And then I built little cairns around the exposed pipes, where they go over the foundation and down into the ditch.  All this slowed up progress to quite an extent - it required a lot of searching for small stones to support and span the pipes so they wouldn't crush under the weight above.  I think I did it okay :-/

Roadhouse

2 Nov 2013
Saturday night, the boys played at Roadhouse.  A fun gig, and a nice finish to Rob's visit.  Nearly two weeks of lots and lots of hard work.  Sunday off, then Monday drive to Igoumenitsa for Rob's ferry.  Thanks for all the graft, Rob!

Moving at the speed of continents

Friday-Saturday, Nov 1 & 2

We just kept going.  Dave and Rob completed the ditch, in between making mixes and moving stones, bringing it up level with the last few barrow-loads of gravel..

The wall reached the music room door, and in the interests of speed, I just sketched in the steps and carried on round the corner.

Same the next day, careering along the back of the kitchen.  I'm back at the lowest point of the foundation compared to the internal floor level, so there's 40cm more wall height here than up at the west side.  It's amazing how much that slows down progress.

Dave and Rob finished moving almost every last stone from the delivery site to the work site, not easy, as there were only very (very) big ones left.  They spent the time in between mixes scrabbling around our acre collecting in-between sizes - prised out of the ground where necessary.