Week 9 - 30 feckin' millimeters

Hello everyone! I hope you are all in good health and having some post-lockdown fun. We are doing well here on Coll and the weather this week has been very kind to us. Although cold, with a mostly northerly theme to the wind direction, it's been very sunny. Even when the air temperature is 9 degrees, if you shelter from the wind, it feels warm. The static caravan heats up like a car in the sunshine so we have hardly needed any Lenny heat this week. I also fixed our gas fire a couple of weeks ago but am wondering why I bothered now - I'd been trying to engage professional assistance for weeks without success so I decided to have a go myself. I found a "Caravan Bits" website and ordered the part I suspected was broken and I was correct. I won't bore you with the details but suffice to say we have a functional bottled gas fire now. In recognition of my limited experience however, we habitually switch off the gas isolator when we are not using the fire!

The phrase "ten steps forward and nine steps backwards" pretty much describes our week. This time however it was not of our making so even though we've lost time, we haven't lost heart. The 9 steps backwards are all because of a measly 30mm too...

Before we started pouring concrete for the garage slab, I asked the garage kit supplier for the exact location of the anchor cleats. This meant that when we were laying the concrete slab we would know exactly where the 25 drill holes would be and we could make sure that no reinforcement metal that was buried in the concrete would get in the way. The bolts are 16x143mm so these holes are chunky! We used the angle grinder and a crowbar to bend and cut the metal rebar out of the drill hole locations before immersing the rebar in concrete. We thought we had nailed it (sorry for the pun)!

This week, we drilled and installed 18 of the 25 anchor bolts and started errecting the steel columns. It was going so well but we noticed that the gap between the columns and the slab edge would not be enough to accommodate the walls. Arg! ... and a few more expletives... It turns out that the bolt locations we were given were wrong by 30mm which unfortunately is enough to kneecap the whole construction. The supplier gave us the column locations but told us they were the anchor cleat locations... furious I was! We now had several problems...

1. £180 of anchor bolts that will forever languish in our garage slab anchoring sweet Fanny Adams to SFA. They cannot be removed. I will always think of them as the lost souls of my workshop and I intend to look in on them every now and again to make sure they are ok. You've got to feel sorry for these bolts.... they have one job in life and the chance for them to step up to their rightful destiny has been wrenched away ... for eternity. Those poor bolts...

2. The erected steel columns would have to be dis-feckin-mantled.

3. New holes would need to be drilled to put the cleats on the other side of the columns in new locations with a real risk that rebar might get in the way.

4. New bolts would have to be ordered to replace the sorry wastrels.

I calculated that, with 18 new drill holes, our chances of hitting rebar was about 6% so that would mean about 1 out of 18 and who knows, we might even get lucky and not hit any rebar. Lucky however we were not and 2 of the 18 holes collided with the subterranean metal resulting in a broken drill bit and a further delay while a special "rebar killing" drill bits could be procured. I managed to borrow a couple of drill bits from our neighbour John Fraser who also very kindly asked his son on the mainland to get a "rebar killer" for me, one of which I've already broken. John is a long term islander and has recently retired from his job with the Project Trust and now runs boat trips. He owns what is probably the best boat on the island (check out https://www.facebook.com/IsleGooutandabout/). John also probably has the best workshop on the island which is very well stocked and he has very kindly helped me out with various bits of missing kit. Thanks John!!

So now we are waiting for "rebar killer" drill bits and anchor bolts and we have not been able to erect the frame of the garage. We have however made 9 steps forward and once we have the bolts, we can quickly progress with the frame.

I know this it a bit technical and dull but, for our project it is probably the worst gremlin yet. The other challenge with the garage is that the assembly instructions are "generic" - it's the same rule book for a huge factory building as it is for a single garage. This means that you have to interpret a hell of a lot and I'm pretty sure we will have more sob stories to report before the job is done. We also have a delay in the delivery of the roller door but that is actually not slowing us down any more. If we can construct a garage with a missing door I'll be delighted!

I was intrigued by how incredibly unstable the 3m high columns are when they aren't attached to anything. They wave about in the slightest breeze and you really need to install temporary bracing or they will bend, if not break, their cleats. We have braced them by burying a fence post 4 ft into the ground behind the garage and putting ratchet straps onto the end columns. We also quickly installed a couple of cross beams too that apparently are know in the building industry as "purlins". Thankfully there are no storms coming in the next week or so and I'm hoping we can add further stability before the hebridean weather returns.

So enough on the garage and on to other news...

We started excavating the house footprint this week and marked out the external walls with strings. This sounds easy but the old "rhombus" problem causes challenges - You get all the sides to the right length but the angles are off. You find this out when you measure the diagonal and then you start all over. I'm sure there is a short cut to getting this right but it has alluded me despite the hundreds of youtube videos I've watched.

We took Ben's advice and put up semi permanent "rugby posts" to mark out the site. This means that we can disconnect the strings to move in/out with the digger and when we are done we can replace the lines to their exact position. Where the lines cross is where the corners of the walls will be. The rugby posts also help setting up the lines as you can move the strings along the cross bar as needed... and boy it was needed! The cross bars have been set with the help of Huey so they are all at exactly the same height. Makes you realise how much of a hill our house is on. There is about 1.5 meters of difference between the front and the back.

We started to excavate the house foundations this week too. We scraped off the top soil and found bedrock at the high end of the house. This is what we expected and we hope it can be incorporated into our concrete footings. If not, we will need a bigger digger with a thing called a pecker! Coll rock is some of the hardest in the world...

So what other news this week? It has once again been a sociable time and we have met others and even been to the pub (beer garden only). We (briefly) met Ben Fogle there - he's here this weekend to film a program on the island which will be aired in the autumn as I understand it. At least the sun has shone for them so I'm sure the wonders of Coll will be well publicised...

Julia had another day trip to Tiree this week. This time it was to see her pal Sarah who was holidaying on the island. She returned with 815 cowrie shells ... about 50 more than Sarah's haul. Apparently Cowries used to be a form of currency - a bit like the Bitcoin of the middle ages! They are still valued by many of the ladies I know and competitive collecting is certainly a "thing". They get collected and piled into jam jars and placed on display among driftwood and other flotsam and jetsam. Cowrie collecting is somehow addictive though, even to the uninspired like myself. You can't stop looking for them amongst the shells on the beach once you start noticing them. I certainly would struggle to leave one I had spotted on the beach. I have no idea why either! Maybe it is a bit like covid and the bog roll rush...

As there will be a load of top soil from the house excavation, we decided to fill in one of the big open drains. This means that we can dump the excavation into the drain to back fill it but also add more on top to create a mound. This will act as a barrier from a) the strong south westerlies, b) the ugly boundary fence and c) the abandoned caravan on the land next to us. One thing I've learned is that you dont want to be "double handling" earth unless you have to. Take it out and put it straight were it's going ... permanently!

Ben was given the task of preparing the drain for the back fill. As the open drain is huge, we decided to skimp on aggregate so we used some geotextile material to wrap aggregate (large pebbles) around the field drain before burying it. This will hopefully stop it getting clogged up for many years to come. We did have a laugh however at the big white sausage we ended up creating. We have been refering to it as Ben's sausage and a sizeable sausage it is too!

Wildlife encounters continue to be fabulous with a (seconded and verified!) sighting of a sea eagle at the end of the plot and a whale in the sea. The eagle was being pestered by large gulls but seemed unbothered by the swooping birds. I assume they were protecting their nests/young. The whale was too far out to identify - we just saw the large back rolling out of the waves a few times. It was probably a Humpback. We also found a few of these wee critters in the grass... apparently not a good idea to handle them as they have poison in their hairy bits!

So that is about the round up of Island Life news. I hope by the end of the week we will have something that looks a bit more like a shed to share. It will still be a skeleton but hopefully a completed one!

Alerts were given to look out for the northern lights but we saw none. I never bore of the sea sunsets though... this is one from last week...