Week 3 - Forms or Blobs

It’s nine o’clock in the evening on Easter Sunday and the wind is roaring in from the North West, buffeting the static caravan so much that I’m occasionally reaching for my beer in case it spills. The various anchor straps I installed over a year ago are whining in the wind - making it seem much worse than it probably is out there. It reminds me of one of the November trips I made to try to secure the caravan ahead of the winter storms. My great friend Stevie joined me on what would be a tiring and memorable visit to Coll. I’m not going to recount the whole trip but suffice to say, the pub was open and many laughs were had in spite of the terrible weather. On the ferry I warned Stevie that if he had the "call to stool" (that’s medical speak for needing a poo!) he must take the spade and find an appropriate spot, dig a hole and so on. Just before bedtime on the first night, I made the fateful suggestion that it would be a good idea to try to align his “schedule” with the morning coffee stop in the pub. Sadly this suggestion placed undue pressure on poor Stevie which disrupted his otherwise regular movements resulting in an urgent calling in the middle of the night. The wind was >50mph with sheets of horizontal rain. No more needs mentioning other than, of all my friends in the wildest conditions, Stevie has the record for the worst wilderpoo experience of them all. That is why we have a camping loo in the bathroom of the static to complement the perfectly good WC that flushes to nowhere! In an emergency, you can poo in a bag - and I have done so a couple of times so far. Not the ecological solution I would like but thankfully temporary until we’ve installed the bio-treatment system.

Enough about number twos! So what has happened in the past week? Well the answer is quite a lot but not as much as we'd hoped. We are behind schedule with the shed/garage but we have done a few other things that needed doing ahead of the plan. It was easy to watch youtube videos in Edinburgh and imagine doing the work. The theory always goes like clockwork but the reality is very different. It's hard to put your finger on what exactly is different but I suppose it is a combination of ones incompetence, the confidence crisis that incompetence creates, and to a smaller extent, the things you encounter such as weather and ground conditions. There is also the physical effort which, for us over 50s, is easy to underestimate. I had hoped we would have the slab laid for the garage by tomorrow but realistically we are a good week away from that. Hey Ho!

The executive summary for the update is - dug a road side drain, installed a culvert on the track, poured all 8 of the 750x750x750 concrete piers for the garage, laid a 100 mm layer of sub-slab gravel, dug a drain behind the static, cleared the area around the garage for wheelbarrow access, enjoyed 2 beautiful sunny days and taken some time off - Tsala had some decent walks! The normal people can read on... the executives had better get back to work.

So let’s start with the garage piers. You basically dig a hole, hopefully in the right place and either pour concrete into the hole (aka Blobs) or install a wooden form (artists might call it a mould), and pour the concrete into that. We used both. We've completed all 8 piers now. Half of them blobs and half forms. In fact one was a hybrid! And the only bedrock we discovered when digging out the garage footprint was exactly where a pier was needed. Perfect! We drilled into that installed some rebar and added a 300mm layer of concrete. A quick pier albeit at the expense of one drill bit.

Bedrock Pier with rebar installed before the concrete

A Blob ... A very big lump of underground concrete

It is preferable to put the piers in exactly the right place and at exactly the right height. Well we didn't do very well at either. Structurally they are fine - the concrete slab is poured on top of them so the height is levelled by the slab. They have to be roughly in the right place to sit below the steel pillars of the garage. The problem is that if they are extending beyond the footprint and are a bit too high, the wooden form for the slab has to be "edited" accordingly. Just another job we might have avoided with a little more care. Oh well! The great news is that we have poured all the piers. That is about 6 cubic meters of concrete … all mixed in a wee electric machine (thanks John) and poured from wheel barrows or directly from the mixer for some of the piers. That's a lot of labour! Thankfully Ju and I were helped by Ben for a couple of days. Ben’s short innings accounted for half the piers - ashamed though I am to admit it! Ben will help us with various work on the project but right now he is back on lambing duty. The mixing and pouring of concrete is an art form. Knowing when to add a splash of water, or more aggregate, or cement is a feeling. I was insistent that we measured the mix accurately but that is not as easy as it sounds. I calculated that 20 of my shovels of ballast would mix with half a bag of cement. I asked Ben to shovel into a bucket to check this and it turns out that his shovels are about double mine! I retrospectively calculated that the average mix for our piers is just about 4 or 5 ballast to 1 cement which is what I was aiming for but it might be more luck than judgement. We need to be a lot more careful for the house footings. Cracks in the floor of a garage is inconvenient, subsidence of the house is a disaster!

Coincidentally, Ben's family live in the house I grew up in back at Glenalmond... Small world!!

Installing the track culvert was a worry.To dig out the very road you depend upon to come and go from your abode is unnerving. Especially when you are left on the marooned side. We needed to do this because the field on the other side cannot drain any other way than over/under our track. So we got hold of 6m of “big strong rigid field drainage pipe” (my words when trying to source said pipe from Oban) and dug up the track and laid it across. Again, I’m not boring you with the details but suffice to say, it was quite an ordeal lasting a full day! The track is now passable but significantly bumpier than it used to be. The highlight of this was breaking the dam and watching the flash flood claiming our new water way on its short journey to the sea. Patrick very kindly delivered the huge pipe from the village on his pickup. He carried it up the track himself and appeared over the horizon like a Greek God from the battlefields on Troy bearing a curious weapon. Thanks Patrick! He continues to advise us and keep us right. It is a huge support when you are floundering around in the dark. My brother in law, Chris has also been a huge help. I reckon he’s been speaking more to me than with his own wife these past weeks. Thanks Chris and Patrick!

The Flood

The culvert installed (sort of)

Julia also took her turn driving Digby... shhh... she's concentrating...

According to the met office, who by the way, have seriously underestimated the strength of the wind tonight, we are to expect snow overnight. This is slightly weird because it hardly ever snows on Coll … and also it’s April! We shall see … but you’ll have to wait for next weeks blog to find out.

Lenny the Leaf has been brilliant! We charge him for free when we shower at the village hall and sometimes do our washing in the bunk house. The 6kw “machine” works flawlessly and we even used it to run the cement mixer when the generator ran out of petrol. This is the future we are seeing here. Batteries will be a part of everyone’s power supply and the cars will just be a part of that. Makes me think of the film "Back to the Future” … "you don't need gasoline where we are going Marty!”

Lenny giving us 6kw via a rather brutal hole in the side of the caravan

Reading Julia’s blog last week I realise that I am definitely from Mars (as opposed to Venus) … A lot of building stuff and not much else! So, to break with habit, let me tell you about the lambing. Our pals Rob and Romayne are local farmers and they are in mid-lambing. It is a crazy few weeks when all the farmers are full on bringing the young safely into the world. We paid them a visit and I witnessed a lamb being born which was I suppose, as expected. What was interesting though was that an orphaned lamb was to be “adopted” by the ewe. As soon as the newborn arrived, the adoptee lamb was wrapped up in the afterbirth. It was then presented to the ewe who is duped by the ruse and took it on as her own. Apparently it works most of the time but not always. Sorry no photo...

In other news, (that sounds like the Two Ronnies), we have been able to capture enough water in the big tank so, depending on rain fall in the coming days, might not have to deploy Operation Pump! We shall see.

The marine batteries are going great guns. We are able to run a wee camping fridge almost 24/7 as well as all the water pumps and laptop/phone charging. And all from one 350w solar panel.

And finally (now it sounds like "Have I Got News for You"), we were woken in the night by super bright flashing green lights. At first I though it might be an extreme solar flare, resulting in a fine display of the Northern lights but no… it was Hughey, our laser level which, having got water logged (waterproof my arse!) decided to randomly turn himself on at inconvenient times. I blame Hughey for the random heights of our piers. Thankfully a replacement is en route from the suppliers.

Hughey in bits ... hopefully drying out

Lucy (daughter) sent us a message on April 1st saying that Good Morning Britain had seen our blog and had commented on it, asking us to get in touch as they wanted to interview us. Nice try Lucy... it nearly worked... :-)

I have to say that this week has had its ups and downs, 2 beautiful sunny days after 3 of the wettest days I’ve ever worked outside in. Throughout, Julia has been a star. She has worked her socks off doing more than her fair share of the heavy lifting but also somehow produces amazing meals and makes the static feel like a home. When the pressure builds up I can be a bit snappy and not easy to live with. I think one of my pals described me (when he though I was out of ear shot) as “not ageing well”. It’s true and I’m trying to do better but let it be said that I really appreciate my super-star wife and everything she puts up with and does for us! My sister, who has a pretty good handle on my failings said she could not think of a better person to be married to her brother than Ju! :-)

Next week you will hear from her again so don’t unsubscribe as it will be far more interesting reading...

Le spèis

Keith