Not Draughty Enough!

A cosy fire in the Living Room

Not draughty enough? Now there's a complaint you probably don't hear many times about houses. Back when we were buying this place as a bit of a sorry wreck in need of huge amounts of renovation, it was as draughty as you'd expect from any old 1850's farmhouse, unloved for 15 years - loose windows, badly fitting doors, dodgy air-bricks, damp voids under rotting and gappy floor boards, chimneys unused for years full of jackdaw nests and so on. You could light a fire in either of the fire places (one upstairs, one down) or in the old disintegrating Rayburn range and they would burn a treat, drawing plenty of air and happily exhausting their heat and fumes up the chimneys into the clean Roscommon air.

An old pillow stuffed up the chimney.

When we arrived with our gutting and rebuilding, our concrete floors (no air bricks!), our new double glazing throughout, our dry-lining and our sweeping out the jackdaw debris, our new efficient range and rebuilt fire-places, we changed all that. We now have an almost entirely draught-free house which is dead easy to heat and keep warm, mostly. Mostly? What we quickly discovered on moving in and starting to use the house, was that it is possibly not draughty enough. It is basically a rectangular box with a chimney at either end. The upstairs fireplace (in the main bedroom) was all but boarded up with the dry-lining sheets but we left a small hole as a vent and a way to rescue birds which might fall down the chimney. The hole, about 6 inches square, has a cheap, plastic, slide-closed cover over it mainly for the look of the thing.

Twin exhausts? One fire, two smoking chimneys

If we did not use the Living Room fire for a few days in cold weather, the chimney chilled down and the air in it would tend to sink down into the room. The Range going in the Dining Room was happy to use this air as its main source of draught, so by about day 3, a veritable cascade of frosty air was coming down the Living Room chimney and spreading out across the floor so that anyone sitting in there was getting very cold feet. Not good. Our first answer to this was to light a fire in that fireplace once a week to re-heat the flue and reverse the flow. If we tried to get both ends hot at once , the two fires would pull air from anywhere, including the blanked off bedroom flue. Smoke coming up the Living Room chimney would be sucked back down the bedroom flu and out through the cheap plastic vent to fill the bedroom and landing with smoke - which was rather alarming. I think there may also be some loose masonry and leaks between the flues below pot-height, as (see picture) when you first light the fire, you get smoke from both chimneys.

Yesterday we got a little fed up with this and decided to investigate fully and do something about it. We needed to stop the downward sinking of cold air. We knew that back in the day, people would have (sometimes ornate) screens in the fire place 'hole' to block the flow. We wondered whether a lump of shaped foam wedged up there would have a similar effect. In the end we settled on an old pillow wedged up into the hole and, Bingo, no more foot-chilling draft. Today we have lit a goodly fire in the fireplace (obviously, taking out the pillow first!) to re-warm the hearth and surrounds, and tomorrow when this fire is done, we will re-wedge our pillow and see if we can keep that room warm with no fire until, coming up to Christmas, when we tend to gravitate in there and curl up with books, we will be lighting a fire daily anyway. This is mainly "for the coze" and will make it a nicer place for the Christmas guests.

Blue likes a warm car bonnet.

The first cat, of course, can happily find warmth without all this scientific air-flow malarkey. He is pictured here adopting the car bonnet on our return from shopping. The lad, though is in the dog house. The problem with having a cat who is good at ratting and mousing, is that they also end up good at catching birds and yesterday I found him playing with a female blackbird. He'd plucked most of the feathers off her back and shoulders and he was pouncing on her as soon as she tried to move from her 'splatted' chest-on-the-grass position. Generally, the victim is so damaged at that point that if you try to prise it away from him, Blue he just sinks his teeth in and it is game over. However, I grabbed him by the scruff before he could  do this and rescued the bird which looked quite perky and alert, and was very warm to the touch. I rescued it to the Tígín to rest for the night and recover - it was almost night time by then. Sadly, the little bird did not make it and presumably succumbed to internal injuries.

Anonymous bottle.

If external warmth is not your thing, then do join me in a wee dram of poitín (potcheen). I think I must have the kind of face which says to shop-keepers that a) I might like a drop of 'moonshine' and b) I can be trusted to be offered same. So on a Christmas shopping mission today (no names, no pack drill, no shops and no presents revealed!) I had another conversation which started with chat about the present (shhhh) but ended up with 'What spirit do you use on the plum pud'n?". Suspecting which way this conversation might be going, I said "Well, probably not with poitín, so maybe brandy or whiskey..." "Why would you not use poitín?" "Mainly because we don't have any". Shopkeeper then took for all the purchases but said "Sure, wait there a minute" and vanished out to the back of the shop. He reappeared with a bottle labelled "Paddy (3 times distilled) Whiskey" but containing a clear, colourless liquid, and proceeded to pour a measure into the bottle's screw-top. Very warming. To cut a long story short we bought the bottle and Liz drove home! She smelled my breath when I came out of the shop, and when she had finished giggling and saying "Why does it only happen to you?"

Hearth and Home

A tiny amount of rain falls overnight; barely enough to lay the 'dusht'. Everything is tinder-dry and the front pages of the Western Mail local newspaper are full of dramatic pictures of gorse fires raging across County Mayo. One report had that the local Fire Fighters had been called out to 200 fires in the last few days. Our own measure of how dry we are is in this picture of strip-grazing on the front lawn, rabbit-style. These runs are moved every day, 24 hours being enough time for the rabbits to annihilate the grass in the run, so as you look from camera towards the runs you are looking at grass recovery growth per day, the nearest patch having had about 11 days to recover. You can see that the turf is still bald and not a cm of grass has grown in the 11 days, and this in Country Roscommon in Ireland's allegedly wet 'wesht' in March and April.

It's so dry that all the farmers are looking to let their cattle out of the indoor yards but they daren't as there is nothing for them to eat out there. I noticed on my dog walk today that even the ferns in the ditches and hedge-bottoms along the lane have that curled, frazzled, freeze-dried look. Liz and I are both wary of praying for rain as we might bring down another year like 2012 (!) but the garden could definitely use some.

'Hearth and Home' - now there is a nice, comforting expression evocative of the centre of a house, a focus for all the family activity. You'd think then that it would be one of the bits you'd be sure to finish as you completed a rebuild. It was certainly one of the first jobs I wanted to do as soon as we got hold of the house keys in December 2011 and readers may recall the fun we had, just newly in through the door, raking out old jackdaw nests, sweeping out the chimneys and cleaning up so that we could light fires in the old Rayburn range and the fireplace in the Living Room. We lit fires pretty much every day from then till our demolition work got to the stage of ripping out the Rayburn and CAREFULLY dismantling the fire place. We even apologised to the house as we drove away each Friday, for not being able to light fires on Saturday and Sunday. It was an important (and successful) part of trying to get some warmth into the house structure and dry it out.

It is, as well, a particularly fine fireplace. The locals think it was way too 'posh' to have been installed as original and must have been added later when the family got affluent. It was in a sorry state, falling away from the wall and with some sections broken. The copper hood, you may recall, was so black and tarnished that we thought it must be iron and in need of black-lead; luckily spotting a slight glint of shine and then getting some good advice from Mazy-Lou involving tomato ketchup as a cleaning chemical.

But we never quite worked out what to do with the hearth once it had all been carefully cleaned and re-hung. We weighed up a number of options involving a marble plinth and brass fenders, or simple dark tiles, but the stone was likely to be in the €200's and the fender another €250. We have sat there, indecisively, looking at the gap in the sandstone coloured floor tiles and found lots of other jobs to do instead!

Well, not any more. When helping John Deere Bob do his turf we spotted a big pile of old waste tiles including some marble-effect black floor tiles in the barn and Bob was more than happy to unload some on us, they having been gathered by one of his brothers while he was still living in the family home, where Bob now lives. He did not know where the brother had got them or why. Armed with a dozen of those and an angle grinder borrowed from Mentor Anne, and a bag of left-over floor tile adhesive, I was away and in just a few hours had created this hearth which we are both very pleased with. It looks very 'right' in our opinion, with the greener, multi-hued marble of the fireplace itself.

Meanwhile, I chug on with digging the pond, rather enjoying the dryness of the soil. The soil is light to lift by the shovel full and easy to walk around on being dusty rather than claggy, and smearing. I do this at about an hour a day, which translates into about 20 barrow loads. I hear all the comments about hiring mini diggers etc but I ignore them. We are time-rich and (comparatively) money-thrifty and, anyway, I LIKE digging. The thought of getting to the end of this project and being able to look out over the water and say "I dug all that by hand!" is an attractive one. It might take me weeks rather than the half a day of a digger, but we are not in any hurry. I do the hour as a 'constitutional', paying my dues, if you like, earning the right to do the easier, more popular jobs. That's just me.

I have, though, discovered how the French game of 'boules' or 'petanque' came to be invented. There was this gang of rural French villagers back in the day, named Etienne, Noel, Pierre, Thierry, André and Ullyse, who sat around the village pump smoking Gauloises and taking the Micky out of the village idiot who was stone deaf. He was so deaf that when asked anything, including his name, his reply was invariably, "Quoi"? and this became his nickname. So well ingrained did the nickname become that no-one could remember his proper name. Growing bored one summer of hanging round the village pump, this bunch of lads decided to go on holiday to Ireland where their long lost Auntie Elize had started to create a small holding in the 'wesht'. The lads' Mums insisted that if they were going, then they should a) take the idiot 'Quoi' with them and b) help Elize as much as possible on the 'farm'.

Well, as it happened, the job that week was to dig a big pond (wouldn't you know it?) so the lads pitched in and started to dig across the chosen space, digging up along the way, all manner of rocks, mainly hard sandstone lumps roughly round in shape and cricket ball sized. To start with the lads piled these in a heap, knowing that Elize might use them as path edges, but as they progressed backwards across the pond, away from their pile of stones, getting stones to the pile involved an under-arm toss of ever-increasing length. Get it right and your new stone clonked nicely into the pile and stayed there. Get it wrong and your stone bounced off one of the existing stones and shot off several yards across the grass and someone had to go retrieve it. Guess who? Quoi of course!

As the distance became greater, there was a real skill in making the correct toss and the lads, being a bit sporty enjoyed the competition with each other, cheering a good throw, laughing roundly at a bad one and even keeping score. The work progressed well and the pond was dug in no time, but the lads had enjoyed the throwing game so much they decided that a sport along the same lines should exist and that they'd take it back to their village and start it there. What to call it, then? Well, suggested Elize, let's make up a word which sounds like a lump of sandstone hitting the pile of stones, but the word be made up from all our names, P for Pierre, E for Etienne, T for Thierry and so on, with a Q for Quoi, of course and an E for their dear Tante Elize.

Or does that sound like a load of 'Boules' to you?