Week 22 - Shooting Stars and Shed Doors

Well I'm certainly not short of content for this week's blog.

Like many other Sunday evenings, I'm settling into a few beers and a couple of hours of "blogging". We only have 4G (with a pretty weak signal), so the uploading of photos and preparing the blog for publishing takes a while. It involves balancing the phone on the top of a cupboard and using a hot spot to upload photos. While the photos are chugging their way into the cloud, I'm reflecting on what has happened and preparing the text.

Over the summer, we managed to build up 1500 litres of rainwater in the big black tank for concrete creation and it nearly did the job. We used 3/4 of it for about 3/4 of the footings but it was clearly going to be a close call for the remaining 1/4 - especially as our wee pond had also dried up and there was little sign of rain in the forecast. So, before the final day of concrete mixing, I somewhat cheekily asked the Coll fire brigade if they might help. They meet every Tuesday for training and sometimes this can include testing their pumps by moving water from A to B. We lucked out and they came round on Tuesday and in a few minutes, over a 1000 litres of water was blasted into our tank. I am so grateful for this as it assured us of the water we would need for the rest of the project.

The relationship between people and jobs on the island is curiously different to the mainland. Most islanders have several "hats". The fire brigade includes two of the guys helping us with the build and most of them are also in the Coast Guard. And, when they aren't doing those jobs, they are managing their farms (+ other activities)! I also discovered this week that some of the same guys are also part of the community undertaking service. More on that later...

Unfortunately, asking the fire brigade to fill up the tank was in effect a rain dance and inevitably resulted in bad weather ... Murphy's law... 24 hours after their visit, the heavens opened and dumped a ridiculous quantity of water on us!

We also managed to get deliveries of the missing blocks/bricks, some additional concrete mix, DPC, DPM, pipes and lintels ... I sense you all glazing over... basically all the stuff needed to finish the foundations which I should have ordered weeks ago!

I am also please to report that is spite of some heavy rain this week, we have finished the concreting and all the foundation footings of the house are now installed. This includes the "Digby Channel" (a bridge left open for digger access) and the middle pier (the footings for the internal supporting walls).

We've also started to create walls! And when I say "we", I really mean Patrick, Tom and Sam... Meanwhile, I ran about like a blue arsed fly, desperately trying to stay ahead of the brick layers - procuring materials that were urgently needed and measuring/marking where pipes and steels are to go. Cammy worked with us for a day and he helped the brick layers by lifting the blocks and making piles where they were needed. Ben took over this task from Cammy and once all the blocks were in place, he helped Julia to fill some of the main field drains. We need to do this now as I will have to landscape the ground around the plot so it is level and up to the top of the foundation wall.

We lost two and a half days this week. One and a half to the torrential rain and one day due to a funeral. When someone passes away on the island everyone is involved and everything stops. Crawford Stevenson was a very successful artist with a long connection to the island. He and Cath (his wife) retired here and built a house many years ago. Sadly, Crawford was a victim of MND and, despite beating the odds and living with the illness for 8 years, he died this week. Everything happens very quickly on Coll due to the absence of mainland facilities. Crawford died on Tuesday and the funeral was on Thursday. Everyone on the island is expected to attend or is at least welcome to attend. It starts in the church with a service and then everyone goes to the graveyard to the burial where tots of whisky are offered out of the back of a car and then everyone then goes to the hotel to celebrate the life of the deceased with soup and sandwiches and the inevitable drinks. The same people, who have many of those "hats" I described earlier, organise everything including the internment. This was our first Coll funeral and I cannot imagine a better send off. It is heart felt and natural and makes me question the rather sterile process I was hitherto familiar with. I only met Crawford a few times and all of them after he was unwell but the eulogy at the service from John Fraser and his son, along with the photos of him over the years, painted a picture of a wonderful man. RIP Crawford.

This is one of Crawford's artworks that I particularly like...

During the rained off days, I have been checking the measurements of the built walls against the engineering plans. It is very hard to get an accurate measurement over 19 meters when your tape measure is blowing in a hooley of a wind so the string lines need constantly checking! It is also very hard to build a wall to a string line that is being "bent" by the wind. We do have a few errors in the dimensions but nothing that I think will cause a problem (fingers crossed) but we need to keep an eye on that. We also found an error on the engineer's drawings this week where one of the steel columns was in the wrong place by 25mm. The good news is that the gap left in the wall will accommodate this and we have yet to install the steels ... phew!! We also had to cut out a section of wall with the Stihl saw as we forgot to leave a gap for one of the other steels... thankfully only a few minutes of extra work but making me realise I need to be checking things ... a lot. I've also come to realise that a Stihl saw can fix anything!

Apart from the house foundations, we have also been doing work on the shed this week. When we finished the shed roof we stopped all work on it to focus on the house but with the driving rain coming through the open front (where the roller door should go) we decided we would have to install the doors. This was as much to stop the water as to protect the roof from being lifted off if a violent storm descended on us. There is a personnel door and an electric roller door so this weekend we tried to install both of these. This proved to be a bigger challenge than expected. I won't bore you with the details but suffice to say, we got the roller door installed and working but... after a few runs, the motor has packed up. We don't know why but will speak to the techies tomorrow. We have a manual option so at least we can close/open it. A notable aspect of the roller door install was an emergency call to our neighbour Mike to rescue us when we discovered, having lifted the roller curtain onto the scaffolding, that we did not have the strength to pull it up onto the rollers. We were then stuck holding the huge curtain onto the scaffold. Thanks Mike!!

We also installed the personnel door and this is the first door I've ever installed so we were heavily depending on Youtube tutorials. A lot of messing about and some difficulty cutting the opening out of the composite wall but it appears we now have a functional door even though we still need to seal the gaps!

Like everything with the shed, there is a complete lack of instruction and we find ourselves having to guess how to put the flashings together, how to cut them and what fixings we should use. I've all but given up trying to get advice from the supplier as I'm pretty sure that most of the time he doesn't have the answers either. Grrr....

I had accepted an invitation to crew on my friend John Fraser's boat on Saturday. John runs private charters (IsleGo) and had a job picking up folk from Colonsay and taking them to Tiree. When he discovered I have my skipper's license he asked me to crew as a favour. I was really looking forward to this but unfortunately with the water pouring into the shed I decided to prioritise the roller door so did not go this time. I hope I will be able to help him out in the future though.

On Saturday night we went to Cliad beach to celebrate the arrival of the new beach caravan. It was a wonderful evening and Rob cooked steak (from his own cattle) on an open fire. It was a 12 year old Highland which is a slightly unorthodox source of steak however it was absolutely delicious. We paired it with decent Rioja and after supper we sat out watching shooting stars from the Perseid meteor shower. The sky at night here is incredible as there is literally no light pollution. This is a shot of Cliad beach on Saturday evening...

We are still deliberating names for the house (in spite of still not having a date for the erection) and one thing has caught our imagination. On the crag above the plot is the profile of a sleeping giant. This is a recognised feature by some locals but not mapped in any way. The more I look at it the more I see and we have been exploring Gaelic words that might align ... nothing decided yet but we like this line of inquiry...

Sometimes these days we have 6 people on site so Julia's lunches are a lot of work! She is feeding hungry builders from our limited facilities in the caravan but she always manages to produce a good spread. They don't expect to be fed by us but I'm sure they appreciate it!

So that's all folks! Hope you have a great week.

K&J x