Week 7 - Wild Fires and Logistics

It is amazing how quickly we take good weather for granted. After 2 weeks of sunshine we have come to expect it all the time. We also get a bit lazy and stop taking full advantage of the conditions for our project. Hot weather = dry ground and when you are digging foundations that's pretty important. All week I've had an uneasy feeling that we will come to regret not using the great weather to best effect and that may well come to bear later on. It is bank holiday Monday and we now have more traditional hebridean weather (wind and horizontal rain) ... and we haven't started digging the house foundations yet.

On reflection, this is in part because of focusing on drainage and the garage but it is a lot to do with having confidence in what we are doing. Starting in the right place and doing things in the right order will be critical and I think, after our water feature debacle (when we started digging the shed foundations), we could now be "over thinking" the whole thing... Paralysis by analysis maybe!

A couple of drawings of the house foundations (blue line is the plot boundary)

We haven't made much progress this week, but that's ok as it's been very enjoyable with plenty of fun. Andy, the guy who drives the lorries on the island, (and is also a slightly mystical and intellectual person), offered us some advice. He said, "Don't forget to enjoy the journey" and we have certainly taken that on board this week. The lorries arrive on the island driverless - they are loaded on the ferry at one end by a mainlander and Andy takes them off on the island and returns them to the ferry. After each delivery he stops for a cup of tea and a blether. He always has great chat and we learn something new about him every time. This week we discovered that he nearly died in a caravan fire (more on why that chat came up later), he believes hydrogen peroxide is the cure to all illness and he (successfully) dowses for all sorts of things, including lost locking nut which flew off a wheel when he was driving. He's also hoping to use this skill to find a lost computer hard drive with £80m of bitcoins on it. I hope he negotiates a good commission for that!

Andy delivering a load a few weeks back - sorry no lorry snaps this week

The main reason for stalling this week is because we ran out of concrete ballast and it has taken a full week to get a replenishment. My calculations for the volume needed for the garage slab and piers were obviously wrong. I must have forgotten to include the angel's share! Anyway, we decided to get a bulk 20 tonne delivery rather than the tote bags now we have reinforced the track and culvert. This finally arrived on Saturday. We now have the confidence to receive a 30 tonne lorry on site ... at least when the ground is dry! This time we asked Andy to reverse up the track which he did fairly effortlessly and didn't even need to use the 4 wheel drive on the truck.

20 Tonnes of Concrete Ballast... Finally!

So what is the "executive summary" this week? We installed another field drain, completed another section of the garage concrete slab, completed the installation of the DPC, concrete form and rebar, removed large rocks from the house site, removed 25 tonnes of top soil from the site (and delivered it to our neighbours), mended the fence to stop Woolly visiting, plumbed the caravan shower and loo (pee only with no paper etc!) into a water channel, researched the hell out of sewage water treatment systems and had a lot of fun.

Julia's hands are a lot better after having some time "off the tools". She went for a day trip to Tiree with friends. The main objective was to visit the Tiree pottery shop but it seems there were other attractions taken in too, including a visit to the co-op and an ice cream on the beach. She had a lovely and well deserved day. It costs £7.50 return to go on the ferry to Tiree and it takes about an hour. On Wednesdays in the summer the ferry goes off to Barra after Tiree so you can spend about 6 hours there and still get a ferry back to Coll on the same day. She was also hoping to visit a hardware shop called "Skinners" which is run by a rather eccentric person. It wasn't open but see below a few pictures of the signage... I'm sure she will tell you more about that in her blog next week.

We have discovered that Zoom calls eat data! We've been catching up with a lot of pals via Zoom and have made a big dent in our data allowance of 30Gb/month. We will be on 4G here for everything (no fixed lines) so at some point I'm going to install a receiver and fast 4G router. The phones and the data allocations are just about keeping us connected for the time being though.

Julia has been continuing to swim in the sea and every time she seems to be joined by the same curious 7 seals. Tsala is also joining her in the water which is good because she needs to have a regular bath!

Tsala and Julia taking a dip

We also have a new potato bed this week. Julia has finally planted her tatties which means they are no longer rolling around on the surfaces in our sitting room! The space has however been replaced with repotted herbs which seem to produce a sizeable fly hatch ... hopefully not biters!

Julia's Micro Potato Plot

...And the Potato Replacements

I think we may have seen the last of Woolly! I chased her out of the plot several times and finally decided to do something about the fence. After my barbed wire reinforcements, (nasty man!) she returned once, leaving a chunk of wool on the wire so I suspect that will be the last visit. We shall miss her but there are some very nice plants and trees now growing here which we don't want munched!

Chasing Woolly out

And what we want to protect...

We intend to put a "herring bone" of field drains down the side of the house plot. They are called herring bones because there are several of them running diagonally into the main drain. From above they look like fish bones joining a spine. These will go underneath a temporary track extension we will build to allow lorries to get up close to the foundations when they are built. We need to get the lorry with the concrete floor beams (2.5 tonnes each) within 9m of every part of the building so one side of the house has to be extremely well drained with the track on top. Julia was in the high castle and did the digging for the first drain, and allegedly I had a "hurry up" expression which was putting her off! Probably true because I've now developed a bit of skill with the digger after many hours and she has only spent a few minutes driving it before now.

Julia's Neat Field Drain - All done and buried

Our neighbours, Liz and Mike have been really kind and welcoming to us and we have enjoyed coffee in the garden and an evening sundowner on the beach with them. They were asking if they could get some top soil as their house is largely on machair sand. We have a lot of soil piled up from the garage excavation and it suited us to remove one pile to make room for the next delivery. So this week, rather than shoving it elsewhere on the plot, I borrowed Rob's tractor and trailer and shifted about 30 tonnes of top soil to their garden. This now sits in two great mounds on their lawn and will take some elbow grease to spread - I hope we haven't over delivered! Rob's tractor is a huge upgrade on Alex's one but I discovered that reversing a tractor and trailer up a bending track and through a minefield of obstacles is actually very difficult - makes reversing the car and trailer seem really easy! Maybe one day I will be able to do it well but for now it is a painful process of "forwards a bit", "backwards a bit", oops ... "forwards a lot", "backwards again"... etc etc...

As far as the garage is concerned, as of yesterday, when we laid another 10 sq. m section, we have one strip to do which will take us about a 7 hour shift. We would have done it today but it is pouring with rain. The garage kit has now arrived in Oban at Parky's yard (Parky is Iain MacKinnon's nick name, who is MacKinnon Haulage, the company everyone uses on the island for delivering the big stuff! Small stuff, including Tesco click and collect orders, are handled by MacLellan Motors. The post office seem to deliver the amazon prime stuff with the mail... And that is the full logistics of Coll! So we will have to figure out how to fill up the 28T lorry with other stuff in order to bring over the garage kit as it only weighs about 4 tonnes... I'm in discussions with other islanders on this and I think it will be a combination of firewood, cement and our trench blocks. The lorry costs about £1k to bring over so it really needs to be full.

Some of the Garage Kit in Oban

I have to confess that this week there was a gathering on one of the beaches of 6 people from 2 households which resulted in a monster hangover for me... I wasted most of Friday moaning in bed as a result unable to eat until the evening. Meanwhile, and not that I knew about it, a wild fire had broken out on the island. It was a horrific blaze covering hectares of land and completely destroyed one house, threatening others as it circled the village. The local volunteer firefighters (who are a mixture of farmers and others on the island) were called up and fought the blaze into the night. People were felling trees and wetting ground to protect the houses and access to the village was impossible with fire burning on both sides of the road. It was finally put out at 23:00. Firemen from Mull also came over to help. The poor family who lost everything are being cared for by the community and we are all looking for their cats who are still missing. We are all hugely grateful for the firemen of Coll who put in a big shift to control the blaze (and some of them could also have been suffering from their own gatherings of 6 people from 2 households the night before as well). The fire was main stream news so there are plenty images online for rubber neckers...

I'm pleased to report that Ben has now rejoined us after his spell on lambing so we have quadrupled the muscle in the team (at least!). He worked with us yesterday on a section of the slab which required a lot if intricate woodwork to sort out the form. After a slow start with that, we got into our concrete making rhythm, Ben and I creating concrete and Julia tamping and spreading it. An enjoyable day, with Julia's 50th birthday playlist blaring over the grinding mixer. Lenny incidentally ran the mixer for 6 hours and it reduced his battery capacity by 3% ... amazing. The electric car idea had delivered in spades ... literally!

Woodwork

Nearing the end of the Slab

One thing that we realised over this past week is that it can get very dry and long spells of no water is a real possibility. Seems ironic as it is currently coming down in sheets but I've had to take water from the burn in a barrel in the back of the car several times to keep up with the concrete making. When we are depending on rain water for everything (at the moment it's only the odd loo flush and washing up) we might need contingency measures. So I'm now in the market for one of these...

I hope you are all keeping well, staying safe, enjoying a bit more freedom ... and getting jabbed! Hopefully we can report more progress next week.