Summer 2006

Here is the news on the latest way to lose a couple of inches from those waistlines.....buy some scaffolding. Having reached the dizzy heights of lintels above the doors and windows, we've decided to get some scaffolding. The trouble is, I feel like a monkey having a very fraught day on the zoo climbing frame. Whenever you are down, there is something that is needed up and, whenever you are up, there is something needed down. Step aerobics has nothing on this.

So, as at the end of June, we have started to prepare the lintels for the doors and windows. These will be from old railway sleepers. They look terrible and knackered but after a bit of planing, look the business. Some of the other lintels and supporting beams were to be from our oak tree cut down last November. The plan was to winch it down to a flatter terrace and attack it with Nick's Heath Robinson chainsaw slicing contraption. Fantastic bit of kit; basically a big chainsaw slung on rollers running along a ladder to slice the trunk into slabs. And wow! What a chainsaw. The biggest engine on the longest chainsaw bar ever seen. Like something out of a 007 movie - 'So Mr Bond, I will leave you to your unpleasant end....'

Disaster! The first main slab from the oak trunk is cut and we expectantly turn it over to see the result. Rot holes! Three of them in the middle of the trunk. Additionally, lots of giant sized wood-boring grubs making the edge of the slab look like a piece of Emmanthal cheese.  I guess we will have some use what we can for benches and burn the rest during the winter.

We have a load of castano (chestnut) beams delivered that will be mounted across the centre of the downstairs open salon area and will support the front of the house upstairs. We need to construct a column using castano uprights and a concrete centre. Meanwhile, Anne has become the Queen of Sanding and is preparing the castano beams using a pretty large angle grinder and an equally large belt sander. Her biceps are toning up nicely (but I better watch what I say).

Overall progress during the latter part of July and August is a little slow partly due to the onset of the Summer heat but mainly due to me being a bit cautious as we reach the critical stage of fixing the big beams in and setting the concrete ring beam - I'm just being a wuss really!

This photo shows the state of play around mid-August. What doesn't show is that we have built a cavity wall construction which isn't the norm in these parts. Chiefly, we are doing this for the depth of wall it provides although there will be, of course, insulation for both Winter and Summer. You can see the central column being erected with concrete blocks between the castano uprights.

Water, once again, provides us with a headache. We think someone further upstream is nicking the water leaving very little for us. We have not built a water storage tank yet but it will be high on the priority list this Autumn. The river is virtually dry and we are faced with either filling and taking water containers from the village each day or, buying an expensive pump to test our 'dry' bore hole that has some water in it but we are not sure how much it will replenish. James comes over to provide help to get some water from the river. A (very) small dam is built enough to make some water pool and feed into our plastic tube. This literally trickles all the way to the house site. All very delicate since the amount of water is small but, nevertheless, works. During the heat of the day, it stops flowing due to the plastic pipe heating up and expanding the air inside (in turn causing a blockage). When the sun moves around, things cool and the trickle starts again. Temperamental or what! We could help to cool the pipe by covering it with earth - hmm, labour intensive, or painting it white - still labour intensive and won't stick.

Meanwhile, the bore hole still has a lot of water in it (about 3000 litres) so we have decided to attempt siphoning some water out to test the bore hole's viability. Because of the vertical depths involved, its hard to get the siphon started.

The other decision is to line the inside of the bore hole with PVC tubing. This will prevent the insides of the bore hole collapsing in case we decide it is viable to put a submersible pump down there. However, to lower 120 meters of large tube down a hole isn't straightforward. The picture shows James and I posing by the next pipe length to be lowered.

Having put 20 three meter lengths down using brute strength (that includes me!), we have to build a rig and pulley system to take the weight of the tubes. We are pleased with the results although we still need to use the Landrover to take the weight of the tubes and control the lowering by using the tow-ball as a bollard.

As at the beginning of September, we have put 84 meters of tubing down and now have high hopes of going all the way down to the bottom (120m) at a fraction of the cost that the drilling company would have charged.

By the way, the yellow thing is our yet-to-be-buried septic tank often called a yellow submarine (can't think why).