A Mum-Seeking Missile

Our two new kittens, who came to us on the day after Brexit-vote day (24th June) are, we estimate, now 4 months old. They are big and lively and have long out-grown their willingness to stay contained within the Sitting Room so we leave that window ajar for them and have taught them to come and go through it so that they get access to the whole garden and yard.

Chip (boy)

They are, however, a bit small  and silly yet to be able to cope with a chase or an attack by the terriers. Deefer would possibly be OK on her own but the 'pups' in pack-mode are a different species, rushing in teeth-first, desperately trying to get in faster than their sibling. Real 'red mist' stuff with no thought to whether this is allowed prey or just ratty vermin needing several bites and shakes to kill it as fast as a dog can. The kittens have showed a tendency to try to get back into the house through the other (non-Sitting Room) windows or doors, which would (and has) land(ed) them in the doggy parts of the house. A mad scramble then ensues to rescue the silly kitten and secure the dogs. We have to remember when we open the Sitting Room window, to close all the others far enough to prevent kitten ingress.

Chivers (girl)

We have started to warily try out some controlled 'meetings' and looking at options like crating the kittens in a room to let the dogs get a bit familiar with them and calm down the killer instinct a bit. Liz tried one yesterday where the 'pups' were locked in the bedroom and Deefer was allowed access downstairs. She apparently walked right past the kittens to go steal their food. Progress of a sort, we guess.

The Araucana x game cock-bird always
manages to look totally demented.

This morning, though, a rude awakening of a new sort. We were lying there semi-asleep in the last few minutes before my alarm goes off (07:30) with the dogs scattered over the duvet as normal. I had every reason to think the alarm would sound, I would get up and then prod some snoozing dogs into action so that I could take them out for a 'comfort stop'. Suddenly all hell broke loose and the three dogs were charging about the bedroom down and around each side of the bed, round the foot-end or over the top (and us).

Guinea Fowl also managing to look demented. 

They can't actually get under the bed as the space is full of suit cases, crates of bed linen and 'other season' clothes but the spaces are small enough to allow in cats and Soldier in particular likes to wake me up for (his) breakfast by playing with the dogs and winding them up. In the half light I assumed he would be, as usual, on my bed side table 'asking' to be let out (and then fed downstairs, of course). Then I saw the real cause of the chaos - a kitten was running around and diving under the bed whenever a dog got too close for comfort. Luckily he was still intact and Liz, awake and out of bed in an instant was able to scoop him up while I tried to hold all three dogs at a distance. Obviously we had left too many windows open and the bedroom door, and the kitten had woken up, then gone out, come back in through the kitchen and hunted us down in our sleep. "That boy is like a Mum-seeking Missile" was Liz's comment. Luckily, no harm done and a lesson learned.

K-Dub hacks off render with the medium
sized kango hammer. 

Meanwhile, work has started on the kitchen extension. First job once the site had been cleared was to hack off the render on the house side of the new space, so that we get a lovely attractive stone wall in the kitchen, instead of the stippled "gravel-dash". The plan was to hack off this, rake out the (pointing) cracks between stones and repoint with pale mortar which will contrast with the beautiful dark grey of (we hoped) the lovely quarried, shaped stones.

Raking out the old pointing and the 'gobs'
of render in the cracks

We were not at all sure that the stone would be beautiful, of course. Plenty of the internal walls proved to be a right old mess of concrete blocks, old bricks and re-used rubble. But 'no', we were delighted to find quality stone work with big blocky 'coin' stones at the corners and well bonded rows of good stone throughout. Some of the coins are 13" high and one was a gorgeous black stone which will make quite a feature. We were also delighted with how "handy" (well) the render came away. You can be days chipping away inch by inch. You don't know till you start. The kango-ing, raking out and then wire-brushing were all dusty, messy jobs and my hair felt like a Lego man's one-piece plastic wig by the end. It was pure joy to be able to get into the shower.

Lovely stonework revealed. 

Since these pics were taken we have moved on. The plumbing has been moved to accommodate the new roof (mainly sneaking the vent 'stack' out sideways through what will be a block-work in-fill mini-wall so that we do not have to make a big hole in the new roof). We have also measured up and now ordered all the timber for rafters etc. That should arrive tomorrow. More on this in the next post.

The Buff chicks are a month old now. 

Tonight we will be a bit more careful with the windows at lock up. By the way, I love that the spell-checker on this site offers you 'mango' for Kango. While trying to work out what a Mango-hammer might look like, I am also trying to see tropical fruit used to remove concrete render from the outside of a house.

Two Years

Remember this? The Building Team's 'Last Supper'

Wow! Can't quite believe it is 2 years since we abandoned the caravan and moved in to this house. The house was technically not quite finished and was certainly not fully furnished, but we had bade farewell to our main man, Ace Builder, Brother in Law and All Round Hero, 'Sparks' with a 'Last Supper' on the 25th April 2012 (our first proper meal 'indoors') determined not to move in till we had ticked a couple more boxes; taking delivery of our mattress, mainly! However, at supper on the 26th with just the two of us we decided that we did not really want to go back to the caravan to sleep so we brought the duvet in and made up the king sized bed using 2 single bed mattresses. We were in.

Crystallized Ginger

We were already thrilled to have achieved so much in terms of serious DIY and buildering, way more than any of us (except Sparks) thought we'd ever be capable of. We had basically gutted the inside of the house and built a new, warm, efficient, dry lined and floor-insulated house inside the old shell. Sparks tends to just go for it; he's seen a mate on one of his building contractor jobs doing it so he gets the tools and says "How hard can it be?". His brain just works to that kind of clear, hard logic - this plumbing manifold is just a question of running pipes to all the taps and sinks and showers and getting a hot feed to every radiator and a return... what's the problem? If he hits any snags he has always got those same mates at the end of a phone to check - the plumber was called, rather unsettlingly "Jimmy the Leak", subject of many a funny story over wine in the evening.

Rhubarb and Ginger Jam

With the house pretty much 'there' and Spring 2012 accelerating towards us we could head outside and start to think about the garden and the smallholding parts of the project which had all been parked up while we played with Kango hammers, 'Spit' (nail) guns and Qualpex pipes. The rest, as they say, is history and has been well covered in this blog week by week. We have tamed the worst of the brambles and nettles, improved the pastures, created a nice lawn and erected good stock fencing. We have created the 'allotment' (vegetable area) and the orchard, erected a poly-tunnel and have dug, lined and planted our big dream-pond, 10 m by 6 m. We have created some raised beds for the 'pretty' stuff.

Stella cherry producing big masses of blossom.

We have started with the livestock - we have a nice established flock of chickens (11 hens and 2 roosters) and have bred some. We have a good trio of geese who produced goslings last year and (one of them is) currently sitting on eggs. We have successfully fattened up 2 batches of lambs (3 in 2012, 5 in 2013) and we and family and friends have thoroughly enjoyed the delicious meat. We have 2 guinea fowl, mainly for fun but we do hope they will breed and produce us some nice edible children. We have a series of rabbits and produced plenty of baby bunnies last year both for the freezer and for sale as living pets. One of these, Goldie, is currently pregnant, due to 'pop' over the next couple of days. In 2014 we are starting into honey bees and pigs.

When one pie is not enough, 2 sausage pies cooked in
stereo, one with added leek, one with caramelized black
pudding and apple. 

We are also well settled down now and have made a good few friends locally, with near neighbours and further afield, all of whom have been very generous with their advice and help. This is the kind of place where you'd never be accepted as a local unless your family had lived here for a hundred years but we think the locals have decided we are tolerable and 'mainly harmless'. Possibly a bit eccentric with our Guinea Fowl strolling in the lane and our tendency to sit out front on sunny days sipping coffee in  full view of the passing cars (gasp!) but so far no-one has come up the drive with pitchforks and flaming torches.

Hazel nut tree recovers well from goose damage.

We have, of course, also learned a lot both in terms of new skills and abilities and about our new home and adopted area. Liz particularly has enjoyed having time to get a bit adventurous in the cookery department especially as she has such easy access to the freshest, most delicious ingredients, our own lamb suet for example, for the crusts of pies and fruit, veg and mushrooms from yards away rather than always the supermarket imports. Most recently she has used the new season rhubarb to make rhubarb and ginger jam where, finding that the recipe needed crystallized ginger which she could not buy she decided to have a go and made her own. The crystalized ginger is definitely the most firey and flavoursome we have ever experienced. The resulting jam is also superb.

I love the apple at this stage - buds still closed and dark pink.

So, there you have it. 2 years of  our story in a nut shell. You are welcome, of course to read back through those 2 years on here just by clicking on the months in the menu. We will be celebrating the anniversary with Sparks, getting the old builder team back together and eating the same main course as we did back on that 25th April. Happy Anniversary.

Banging up the floors

The noise levels rise on Wednesday when the boys break out the hired kango hammer. The concrete floors of the hall, dining room and kitchen are uneven so that they would not sensibly take a lino or tile finish and are, anyway, not insulated, so they are cold and damp, especially the kitchen where we have not been lighting the daily fires and range. In the kitchen this is partly because the gutters round the house outside are so arranged that a downpipe drops water into the small 8' by 8' garden 'gap' between the dining room and the original cottage with no where for it to drain away, so the clay and peat soil is saturated, the wet quickly leaching through under the house wall to make the clay under the kitchen floor wet too. Our mission is to 'break out' all this concrete and then dig down till we are 17 inches below the original floor level. The floor will then be backfilled with two layers of a crushed rubble 'sub-base' which builders call "804", the first 4 inches being stomped down with a whacker-plate before the 2nd 4 inches is spread over and whacked down. Over this will go a thick layer of modern insulated sheeting followed by self-levelling concrete.

This, you will appreciate, is a big job; possibly the worst part of this renovation. Breaking out the floor with the kango is probably the easiest bit. It's a big heavy tool which does all the work itself. The driver merely has to hold it upright and pull the trigger. He doesn't even have to listen to the infernal racket as he has ear defenders on. After each drilling he lifts it out and back towards him 6 inches or so ready to crack away the next small chunk of concrete, leaning the hammer down to prise the bits up a bit to make then easier to pull out by hand. It's hard to start when the unbroken sheet of concrete has nowhere to go, but once you've started an edge it's easier to bite bits off the sides.

The hard bit is the digging out. We have two barrows, one new one, one an old rusty whangy thing left to us by TK-Min. We have two Irish style, pointy shovels. These are 'pointy for a reason', says Sparks. When trying to shovel rubble, a broad ended straight English shovel jars on every stone and is impossible to work. Your Irish one slips in between the blocks, nicking them up onto its face with no jarring. The new barrow is brilliant. The old one is a total pain in the a***, flopping around trying to break off its handles when loaded. The boys decide to scrap it and buy a 2nd new one. It joins the scrap metal pile.

These are brutal, hard work days, just lifting this much broken concrete into a barrow and barrowing it out to the rubble heap, is a killer. The pulling up the loose rubble underneath by hand or shovel is as bad. Some of the boulders are big ones, over a foot long and get carried out singly, saved for some kind of garden rockery use. This gets us down about 9 inches to the clay. We need 17 inches, so the boys must then start shovelling sticky moist clay. It seems to take for ever. They can see where they have been but progress is slow. Dad comments that they load a barrow, take a breather, move the barrow, take another breather. He is feeling like the 54 year old, rather lardy ex computer systems manager he was, rather than a ruffty tuffty construction worker he needs to turn into.

Tired Out
Deefs

Baths and Jack Hammers

Day 2 of the first week with Sparks on site and the stud walls are coming down a-pace. So far we have left the two stud walls either side of the hall, although they have lost their skins. Even these two may be taken down and rebuilt, as they are sitting on top of some rather wood-wormy bits of floor boards which are on top themselves of a possibly sacrificial joist. For now though Mum is assigned the job of tidying them up, pulling out the many thousand nails which porcupine their surfaces.

One job which happens today which had not been possible without Sparks was to lift the big, cast iron bath, too heavy for Mum and Dad as a combination. With no mains water on site yet, this bath is being brought down to the cattle-yard and put under a down-pipe to collect rain water for use by cement makers and plasterers (not to mention chemical-toilet operatives). It's heavy lump and the boys turn it upside down to try to slide it down the stairs, so that the feet do not dig into the treads. Also on today's list, Sparks pulls down all the horrible old style fibreglass wadding which had been loosely wrapped around the water pipes and water tank in the loft space.

In the afternoon the boys head for Castlerea (we now know it's pronounced Castle-Ree as opposed to Castle-Ray which is the one up by Belfast). Castlerea and the nearer village of Lough Glynn (everyone says "Lock-Lynn" but with a softer 'lough' sound rather than a hard "CK") are becoming regular haunts and we are recognised and hailed by an increasing number of people. Mum is also getting to be a regular at the nearby town of Ballaghaderreen (pron "Balla-adreen" with a slight catch of the breath between the two 'a's so that la-ad is almost but not quite, two syllables). Castlerea is home to the builders merchants where we need a new barrow and 2 'pointy style' Irish shovels (of which more later) and home to the plant hire place where we must hire a generator and a 'Kango' hammer.

Now we look like a PROPER building site.
Deefer