Solar 'n chill

Winter is upon us, the first one with our present house heated by air source.

Not until next spring will we really be able to compare previous with present, gas boiler with electric condenser, but just what are the likely differences?

Well the first is the name. The term 'boiler' no longer applies since nothing is being 'boiled'. In fact nothing is even being heated so even the term 'Air Source Heating' is misleading. There are other modern gadgets which suffer a similar naming confusion (the air fryer being the most obvious since it is merely a small oven) but with 'air source' we seem to have totally lost the plot. We use the term 'refrigerator' to refer to a cabinet which is kept cool inside by removing heat from within. This heat is dissipated via an external heat exchanger, usually at the rear of the cabinet, but we don't acknowledge the fact that our fridge is merely a kitchen unit which moves heat from one place to another, no different, therefore, from the air source unit which now stands outside our back door. Both machines are doing the same thing, the only difference being one of scale. We are fortunate enough to have lived with domestic central heating most of our lives and have therefore become accustomed to heat being generated by combustion, be it oil, gas or coal, all very easy to understand. Then air source comes along to mess with our heads.

There is, of course, another source of heat which comes free and needs just one thing, a clear sky. We awoke one morning to a frosty landscape, a dusting of white covering everything outside while the 'air source heating' kept us warm inside. Soon the sun was beaming in through our windows and by late morning it was doing something else too. It was providing us with warmth. We live far enough north that at this time of year the sun is quite low in the sky so it is sort of unexpected when this happens. Yet it removes the frost from anything it shines on and, where the sun's heat is captured, it can raise the temperature even above that already inside the house. We call our heat capture unit the 'conservatory', a glass sided room attached to the south side of the house with a door leading into the kitchen. Conveniently we live north of the equator so our conservatory being where it is captures heat when the sun is at its height and therefore most powerful. The door into the kitchen can be opened to allow that heat to flow into the house.

But in winter this doesn't last long. By four in the afternoon the sun has dipped below the hills and the temperature in the conservatory will start to plummet, by ten degrees or more, the warmth slipping away through the glass windows and leaking outside. Ah, but some of that warmth will be captured by our 'air source heater' and pumped back inside the house so all is not lost. Ideally there should be some mechanism that detects when heat is captured by our conservatory so that on a cold day it can be moved  into the house - but we haven't invented this yet.

All this heat being moved about from place to place might sound confusing but the real head scratcher is how the air source unit can move heat from outside the house when the temperature outside is barely above freezing. To answer this one must return to the refrigerator and turn up the dial inside. The effect of this will be to make the already cool inside space even colder and at the same time the fridge will dissipate more heat around the kitchen. What we learn from this is that cold is merely an absence of heat and we can move heat, even from somewhere that is already cold, to make it colder. Our air source unit is taking heat from outside and moving it inside. One effect of this is to make Scotland colder, although this is only temporary as no matter how well insulated our house is, the heat inside will always leak out eventually. But contrast this with oil or gas heating where heat is actually being generated, making Scotland, and the world, warmer.

Right, well that's cleared all that up.

From kitchen to pond

Describing the steady progress made with tiling our kitchen walls is of no real interest to anyone not directly involved so we will not dwell on it any more here. Hanging over us throughout the whole process is the 'Have we ordered enough tiles?' question, something which any kitchen fitter regularly faces. As it turns out we find ourselves with a whole box left unused, which naturally begs the question, 'Where else can we put them?'

Anyway, that's both sides of the kitchen completed decoratively and on the end walls, where we decided we needed to add some colour to the otherwise grey/white palate, we are very pleased with the effect we have achieved. A recent visitor remarked that we were steadily bringing our home decor into the twenty first century, a comment that we were delighted to hear.

This could be the last kitchen picture ever to appear here. The inset shows where we started just over twelve months ago. Job done!

So moving on...

It has been some months since our garden pond featured in this blog so perhaps it is time for an update. No? Well here it is anyway.

Our rear garden is on a slope, from the back fence down to the house, so any pond was always going to have to be a hole in the ground with a dam below it, a soil bank, to contain the water. As it turned out our wet climate ensured that the hole filled with water from the moment it was dug and originally we thought it might retain a certain level of water without the need for a liner. But when a dry spell last spring reduced it to a muddy puddle we decided a plastic liner would be needed after all. Then, in order to keep the pond water level constant, we fitted an overflow pipe which took away the surplus, all of which seemed to work well until the real rains started in September.

Suddenly, almost overnight, the pond liner started rising, forced upwards by the pressure of the ground water from beneath. How this could be happening in a sloping garden seems to defy logic but the effect of this was that as the plastic liner rose higher the water inside the pond was forced out through the overflow until almost nothing was left. The pond life which had spent the summer months galavanting about above and below the surface were now living in a shallow puddle, if they survived at all. Even large rocks placed into the pond (rocks being heavier than water) failed to counter the pressure from beneath - they too were being lifted up! All this goes to show is how little we know about what is happening beneath our feet. There are forces at work that we could never imagine.

Initial attempts to try to relieve the pressure from below by poking a long metal spike horizontally into the ground below the dam in an effort to create a passage for the ground water to escape had no effect at all. More rain arrived and despite it falling into the pond itself, this was always countered by more pressure from below so nothing changed. 

After much contemplation we realised that it is merely a matter of balance between two opposing forces. The pond overflow is constantly draining away the excess water and this means that as the pressure from below increases, it lifts the liner and more pond water flows out of the overflow.  It follows that as this happens the weight of water in the pond decreases so it is unable to resist the force from below. It took a while but once the simple logic of this was recognised the solution became clear. The pond overflow pipe had to go.

The result was almost instantaneous. Several days of heavy rainfall and the pond had water in it again, the liner having being squashed down under the weight. We now have a pond, deeper than planned, but one with water in it. When it fills now (which doesn't take long given the rainforest climate here) the weight of water in the pond increases to counter those hidden and mysterious underground forces. Eventually the pond water will overflow the edge of liner and the excess will run down into the boggy area further down the garden. This is now a small wetland that we will keep suitably unkempt in the hope that this might be attractive to some other wild creatures.

As autumn moves on and winter sets in there is little to see from our observation perch beside the pond. The pond skaters have all gone although there is still the odd beetle scuttling about beneath the surface. The wild plants (commonly described as weeds) surrounding the pond have extended across the water (as intended) in the space of less than a year but we must wait until next year for what we'd really like to see... frogspawn. Should there happen to be a lady frog passing nearby we can just hope she might be attracted to our fledgling wildlife haven. Would a 'Frogs Are Welcome Here' sign help?

Kitchen distractions

One day there's a knock at the front door... it's a delivery, something we are expecting. A pallet is shuffled off the back of a lorry and lowered onto the road. On it there are seven heavy boxes tightly wrapped in plastic, each one needing to be carried up our many steps and into the house. They are all marked with the words Revestimiento Ceramico and each one contains 44 smooth white tiles which, with an additional bundle of 10 more, adds up to 318. Each of these now has to be fastened to one or other of the walls in our kitchen.

The first question might be as to whether to call this a 'project' or a 'job' but the answer comes easily when we decide where to fasten the first tile and immediately realise that it will need a piece cut out of it so it will go around the first of the many wall mounted power sockets. This definitely makes it a project, one that will take many days and a considerable amount of time and patience. At the end of the third day we still have 281.5 tiles left in their boxes but at least one of the most difficult sections of wall, the one with most wall sockets, is covered. Sticking whole tiles to a wall is considerably quicker than fiddling an odd shaped piece around a power socket but even so the numbers are still pretty daunting.

We are, of course, under no pressure to complete the project at this point as we have a fully functioning kitchen. Life can continue as normal, one would think, although there is always something nagging when it comes to an unfinished project. Nevertheless when our charity coast walking friends need help for their progress around the coast of Wester Ross (one of the most remote areas on the west coast of Scotland) we decide this should take precedence over tiling and we set off north in Martin. Two days later we find ourselves in a blast of bitterly cold air from the east which takes our breath away and makes us question the decision but after wrapping up in enough layers to insulate a frog we realise that this is an opportunity to explore the wild terrain we have driven into. 

So off we go, and without meeting a living soul we climb up into a gorge then, pausing for breath beside a crystal clear torrent, it becomes clear why we set off. The wildness of the place just blows us away.

The waterfall is an added bonus.

Thankfully the bitter cold moderated after a few days and we were able to recover. In all we spend more than a week lending a hand by driving two campervans, Martin and Nancy, from place to place along the wildest coastline in Britain. This involves negotiating tiny single track roads where a single wheel off the tarmac could spell disaster but the views around each corner take our breath away and the sunsets each night are simply stunning.

Our keen walker friends set off early each day and once we had moved their campervan, Nancy, to their expected finish point we have plenty of time to set off exploring on our own.

This is a place of big skies and big mountains, the terrain being rocky and difficult to traverse on foot but it has never failed to take our breath away each time we have visited. There are glimpses of deer, who tend to keep their distance, unlike the sheep who will wander about on the road or lie beside the footpaths which wander off into the hills. The history of this landscape is full of sadness, crofters driven from their homes by greedy landowners, but there are still plenty who choose to live here, making their living in other ways.

We took our leave from Nancy and her owners beside the lighthouse at Stoer in Sutherland, a halfway point in their round the coast walk. It could be argued that a campervan of this size is totally unsuitable for the narrow single track roads of the north west Highlands and after having for the last week driven around many tight corners on roads with rocks bulging out on either side I would be the first to agree. At least we had a specific reason for doing it and there were similar vehicles of this size so clearly there are others who feel it is quite acceptable.

Kitchen refit 3

Another diversion from refit activity took place when these two turned up on our doorstep, complete with enormous rucksacks. Antony and Sally Brown were walking around the whole UK coastline to raise money for the RNLI, our privately run lifeboat charity, and we caught them coming through our village and gave them a bed for the night. They had to manoeuver around the assorted kitchen hardware but this didn't seem to bother them too much.

Surprisingly it turns out that kitchen refitting is a weather dependent activity - who'd have thought it! Too hot and work grinds to a halt but cooler with lots of rain and our preference for staying dry keeps us inside where staring at an unfinished kitchen will always provide the motivation to crack on. So side two begins, destruction first, lay the flooring then reconstruction. For the first time we would find out whether everything fitted. We knew it would be tight, four base units side by side, leaving just enough space for our small dishwasher....

...and it was tight. But as it turned out everything did fit.

This is good news. But it is only part of the story because on top of these things we need a worktop, a continuous wall to wall length, just short of three metres long. Careful measuring was required (measure five times, cut once) but despite this, making the cut with a beast of a power saw was as stressful as it gets, but then to know if it fitted we had to carry the massive chunk of worktop up from beneath the house, through the back door and into the kitchen. It then had to be lifted high at one end and manoeuvred between the two plasterboard walls before being gently lowered into place.

It fits, just. At a squeeze.

This is not the end, of course, for we must cut an enormous hole in it to fit the new sink, something that must then be connected to pipes which rise up through the floor in the most inaccessible place possible, behind the kitchen units we have just fitted. And all through this process, from the moment we ripped out the old bits from kitchen side two, we had no water, so we had to wash up using the shower and we were filling the kettle from the bathroom sink. The pressure to complete the work dominates our lives, each day requiring different tools to be located, holes cut precisely, screws tightened carefully, and important decisions made on the sequence of moves necessary to achieve success. Connect the plumbing first, turn on the water to check for leaks, then everything had to be disconnected again to secure the sink properly on a bed of messy silicone. The plumbing was made worse by having to connect a new sink to rather aged waste pipes which were of a different size. Years ago someone must have decided that waste pipes needed to be a 1/4 inch bigger so that plumbers could make more money by fitting new pipes in everyone's home. A professional would have known this, of course, and have all the right fittings ready to hand. A mere amateur, however, is faced with having to cannibalise the old sink to recover the right collection of bits. Such is life!

After a full week of a kitchen without water our days of washing up in the shower are finally over. Side two is operational albeit many details are still to be completed. We sit back and relax, to let the stress dissipate.

A series of equinoctial gales arrives and the howling noises as these whip past the house are unsettling but thankfully no damage occurs outside. The accompanying rain batters against our windows and drenches the garden (not a new phenomenon in these parts) but this time the pace of internal refit work has slowed, become more relaxed now we have a functioning kitchen again. Our refit project is not done, far from it, but the rest can be finished gradually as time allows, each tiny step taking us closer to our vision of the perfect kitchen.

Perhaps this is the time to recap, to compare what we have made with what we inherited when we bought the house some twelve months ago. Would our vendor recognise this as her kitchen, I wonder. The far end wall needs a lick of paint and tiling will be added elsewhere but strangely the space feels bigger than before, less cluttered and with the brilliant lights in our suspended ceiling we are proud of what we have achieved.

Kitchen refit 2

On delivery day the boxes arrived early, on pallets, at barely past nine in the morning. The two men saddled with carrying the heavy packages up from road level to our house clearly wished someone else had been given this particular job. The flooring boxes were particularly heavy, like they were full of lead, but in the end nothing was dropped or damaged, something we are grateful for. Our spare bedroom is now full, totally unusable, but over time this will change.

After day one we had made a small dent in the kitchen box stack.

This shows our progress, just two wall cupboards fastened up, but what this hides is the effort involved in mounting them securely. A plasterboard wall is not designed to take the weight of a cupboard full of crockery so strengthening had to be added in the form of a wooden beam sunk into the wall. This is not a time to stint on strong screws. Our motto is: "Max out on each fixing even though it looks safe".

Our new kitchen is getting fitted in two halves, one side of the room at a time. Side one is the easiest, perhaps, as it doesn't have the sink and also there is less old kitchen to dismantle before the new stuff can go in. But this two stage strategy will also involve laying the new flooring  across the room in two halves. To prepare for this all the new units are first assembled elsewhere in the house so that they are ready to go in as soon as the flooring tiles are fitted, these starting from one wall and going to a line down the centre of the room. When this is done the new kitchen units can be lifted into place, levelled and then secured (more big screws). One of the three metre long worktops currently stored beneath the house will need to be extracted so that it can be sawn to the precise dimensions needed and this is not an easy job since these things are heavyweights. But let us look ahead. When all this is done we will have a working kitchen, half new and half old, so might this be a good time to take a break from the house for a while, a short holiday?

We had delayed starting the internal refit work due to an unusually hot September which made working inside unimaginably uncomfortable but there was still plenty in the garden to occupy us. A little archeological exploration revealed a garden feature previously hidden beneath the long grass.

This stone ringed flower bed emerged into daylight for the first time in decades once the overgrown shrub was hacked back to a few stumps and the meadow that surrounded it was strimmed down. The perfectly cut grass lawn has never been our concept of a nice garden but we do like to know what features lie hidden from us.

One area that will remain totally wild is the pond with its surrounding vegetation and this strategy has already proven successful in attracting a variety of insect life including some of the largest dragonflies on the planet. 

Getting the photographic evidence to support this claim, however, has not been easy. These creatures are fast movers on the wing, constantly darting about at incredible speed. One (barely) successful shot of a yellow bodied beauty was eclipsed by the arrival of an even larger blue dragonfly who returned later with a mate, both beasts being the size of small birds.

They eluded my efforts with the camera however several weeks later we found this beauty lying on the ground beside the pond, the last moments of his life fading away. Dragonflies only live for a few weeks in their adult form.

All this, of course, is a digression from kitchen building. A week has passed, a long time in the world of refit, and we can now boast that we have half a working new kitchen.

The new units are all screwed in place, the worktop pieces fitted and fastened, shelves and drawers assembled and lined up, job done. All that remains is decorating the walls which will be a post refit job.

What we didn't foresee is the long learning curve associated with memorising each item's new storage location. We constantly find ourselves darting in the wrong direction to find a fork, a plate or a tin of rice pudding then pausing for a think, giving our brains a chance to remember which new cupboard to open.

Kitchen refit 1

The previous blog entry did rather spoil the surprise didn't it. The only question that remains is how many more episodes will appear here before it is done.

Let us start with the kitchen floor then, which originally looked like this...

Beneath this, however, was the real horror, vinyl tiles stuck down with an adhesive which leaves a sticky residue on the floor boards beneath.

Scraping and peeling these things up proved very physical (as well as being tough on the knees) but the floor's unevenness across the room made it essential so it had to be done. The horrible sticky residue left behind had to be covered over immediately before it grabbed our feet and then spread to the rest of the house so the job was done section by section then covered immediately with a thin layer of plywood.

This levelled the floor and also formed the base for the flooring we will eventually lay on top, 'Luxury Vinyl' tiles that click together without the use of adhesive.

But of course we can't do that yet. First we must dismantle and remove the existing kitchen units so we can put the new flooring down. And this creates a problem. A kitchen is a workspace which is in use every day. The cooker, for example, sink and refrigerator, will all be in use at some point for each meal we prepare and they cannot easily be moved elsewhere. So this requires a plan. Just like a game of chess there will be a sequence of moves made in the correct order. We decide we must tackle the job in two halves, an imaginary line drawn down the centre of our kitchen, each side being torn apart, upgraded then replaced in the shortest possible time. Simple really. Once we start each section, however, then the clock starts ticking and we must work on, our lives being on hold until that side is done.

So here is the plan for kitchen side one.

Switch off cooker, move it across the room, empty and remove base unit and wall cupboards, move fridge/freezer across the room, clean up, lay flooring, move cooker and fridge back onto new flooring, fit new wall and base cupboards, cut and fit worktops. Job done.

But hold on...we haven't even unpacked the boxes yet.

Pausing the rush

It has been non stop, full on for the last twelve months, right from the moment we decided to sell up and leave the village that was to have been our forever home. That simple decision had us searching the internet at a time when very few suitable properties were on offer but then, quite unexpectedly, we found one we liked. Our offer was accepted almost immediately so we had to move quickly to start  selling our Carradale home. As it turned out this too happened quickly. The To-Do lists grew longer and longer - removers, services, packing - then there's the horrible business of deciding what to take, what to leave, what to sell and what to throw out.

Looking back we try not to dwell too much on the moving day mishaps but suffice to say we landed.

Most people might think that having moved in and unpacked then it would be time to relax, to slow down, time to become acquainted with the neighbours, to explore locally, to learn where the nearby footpaths might take us, all these things done gradually. But this wasn't how we did it. We knew, right from the start, that we would want to change so much about the house we had just bought and that for some of those changes we would need professional help. But involvement with outside contractors meant that we would be tied to their timetable, one that may not fit our own. In an ideal world one might expect to know weeks or even months in advance when work would start, but this is not the world we inhabit. In our world we awake every morning expecting to receive the vital call giving us a start date for one project or another. We dare not go away, holidays are off the agenda, even leaving the house to go shopping is risky. But the call doesn't come. It becomes a mental challenge with no resolution. So we throw ourselves into changing the bits we can do ourselves, right until our physical endurance runs out. I soon realise that I have lost weight, my body tissue having been eaten away by all the physical stuff, hacking away at the bits of house we don't want, moving things from place to place (then sometimes back again), digging up unwanted plants in the garden and hacking back others, the list goes on. A whole three kilogrammes of weight has disappeared from my body. Lost forever?

Morning view from our window

Then finally the end that has been scarcely in sight for so long arrives and suddenly something changes. The list of outsider jobs comes to an end. This does not mean we have finished doing everything we wanted to do to the house, far from it, but it does mean that we are now responsible for and can control the future timetable ourselves, stop and start when we want, even go away and leave the house without worrying that we might miss something. We can get our lives back.

It takes time to adjust to this, however, particularly as the weather outside is un-summer-like. The threat from sudden downpours has us checking the sky every time we go out. 

"That dark cloud looks a little threatening...do we need coats?"

Rainbows come and go like buses (they are never there when you want to photograph them) and the heatwaves that seem to be plaguing the rest of the world have missed Scotland.

We soon realise that summer weather on its own is not the simple cure we seek. We must make a mental adjustment to change from domestic project to chill-out mode. We have a house, it works, so we just have to accept and live with it's temporary imperfections. There's no rush.

Time to replace those lost kilos perhaps.

Evening view from another window

All this is easy to say, of course, but the words 'chill out' are not part of our vocabulary. The kitchen ceiling is done so why not start on the floor? But hold on...we can't replace the flooring without dismantling the kitchen units and ripping out the sink. This is beginning to sound like another big project.

Chris arrives home

For one man, a broad sandy beach on the Gower peninsula in South Wales recently marked the end of a mammoth journey which began on the same spot back in 2017. Since then he has walked not just around the entire UK coastline but around every offshore island too, inhabited or otherwise. His reasons for doing this are spelt out on social media and in a book that he published at a midway point on his journey, Finding Hildasay. The amount of money he has raised for his chosen charity, SSAFA, is almost beyond belief.

For us, however, the story starts in 2018, by which time Chris had made his way to Scotland and was painstakingly following the many twists and turns of the Argyll coastline, documenting his progress through the Facebook pages that would track every inch of his six year mission. For this is what it had become for him, a life-changing challenge, the biggest undertaking he had ever taken on. And as he explains in his book, whilst walking along the coast through the village of Ardrishaig, carrying his usual massive rucksack, wearing his trademark kilt, his distinctive headwear, and with his dog Jet at his side, he met our son Michael who lived there at the time.

The bond forged between them on that day was something special and the rest is history, as they say, but it does explain why we chose to leave home and drive over 500 miles south so as to meet Chris on the beach in Rhossilli Bay to witness his final steps as he crossed his own starting point.

With him on the beach, along with Jet, were his fiancée Kate,  their son Magnus and most remarkably, several hundred followers who had travelled from far and wide to meet and welcome them home.

Just like all the others we were able to walk the last mile across the sand with him and marvel at this remarkable man's achievement. The money he has raised for the ex-servicemen's charity is simply staggering yet Chris's modesty at what he has achieved is equally hard to believe.

Our son Michael may no longer be with us but Chris's memory of their brief time together has stayed with him and the massive emotional hug that I received from him when I introduced myself was so full of meaning that even now I am overwhelmed when I look back on that moment. We made the 1,100 mile round trip just so we could be there to meet him and it was worth every inch.

Life and other sharp things

It wasn't so long ago that we were celebrating the elimination of bramble from much of our garden and recovering from clambering around the steeper parts where the stems seemed to hide most successfully. Realistically 'elimination' was never going to be the correct word since, much like the cockroach which was one of the few creatures to survive the Late Permian Extinction Event, bramble is a tough plant to kill. So now that we are firmly into summer and everything in the garden is growing at full speed it is inevitable that the tough roots which still lie beneath the soil are sprouting new shoots wherever they can. And it is here we come across one of the plant's cleverest strategies. It likes to hide its new shoots within the stems of another shrub so that it becomes visible only when the shoots have acquired significant strength and toughness and are pretty much indestructible. But this is only part of it. The clever bramble will select a host plant in which to hide which has its own defensive strategies, be they sharp thorns or stinging leaves. From a human perspective this can be seen as a cunning plan on behalf of the bramble since most attempts to remove the plant will involve pain of one sort or another, enough to discourage most people. Nettles are one example of a favoured bramble companion but in our garden we also have gorse, holly, wild roses and strawberries and also blackthorn, the latter having long dangerously sharp thorns hidden amongst its innocent looking foliage, spikes that will penetrate even the toughest glove. In fact we hadn't realised just how hazardous our garden was until we started searching out those spiky little bramble shoots and we now live permanently with the consequential scratches on our arms and legs.

Having got all that out of the way it is now time for a short pond update.

So we'll start with The Mud, a technical term for material recovered from a discreet raid on the pond in the public wildlife area of our local castle. This pond is quite natural (indeed it may well have been there when Robert the Bruce was rebuilding the castle back in 1325) and the small container of mud that we liberated brought us a random collection of tangled roots which will almost certainly add to the diversity of vegetation living in and around our pond.

The mud is now spread out along the margin in such a way that those roots can extend into the water whilst keeping a footing on the bank. At first it simply looked like, well, just mud, but then gradually on my daily progress checkups I began to notice thin strands extending out into the pond beneath the water, roots seeking out nutrients to feed something living within the mud and then eventually tiny shoots rising from the mud itself. We have no clues as to what might be growing and nor do we care. It is life, in all its complexity, which is all that matters.

At this point our pond is less than six months old, a hole dug into sloping ground with a plastic liner and an overflow pipe to keep the water at a constant level. Two separate raids on the castle wildlife area have brought us a small sample of plant life, an insect menagerie (although most of this may have found its own way there, we assume by air), a small collection of tadpoles and a newt called Nigel. There are now countless water beetles and pond skaters, damselflies engaged in egg laying but sadly the tadpoles are gone and we think we now know the reason for this. Hidden amongst the imported weeds was a large nymph which has gone on to become the biggest dragonfly we have ever seen - the size of a small bird. The nymph's exoskeleton was left behind, floating about on the surface, a reminder of an early life spent gorging on amphibians who had nowhere to escape to. The adult dragonfly pays us occasional visits so maybe he/she has designs on making this a permanent home. Time will tell.

The pond will develop, becoming more natural looking as the mud and the surrounding vegetation matures to hide the exposed edges and we hope that by next year this will attract other amphibians who might just happen to be passing by and who might fancy spawning there. Perhaps even Nigel will return.

Wrapping up the house - 1

So that's it. A new heating system installed and working and then we just sit back and relax.

I don't think so. Not our style at all.

It's like this. The house we moved into some six months ago is perfect for us in so many ways and yet, in so many others, it is not. The central heating was originally powered from a large gas tank which now sits (empty) in the front garden. We are delighted to have installed Air-Source heating but we still have the issue that whatever heat we put into the house vanishes as soon as it arrives because the house has no insulation in its walls. We are not unique in this, of course, but somehow the very thought that the more heat we create for ourselves living inside the house, the more leaks out, makes us feel uncomfortable. What seems to be happening is that our new heating system is warming up the whole of Scotland, a futile and hideously expensive concept.

So alongside installing new heating we have always had another plan. This involves wrapping up the house in something that keeps the heat in; it is called thermal insulation. There are various ways of doing this, of course, but the one considered most suitable for us is an external insulating layer secured to the outside of each wall in such a way that the inside heat can no longer escape. This, combined with insulation beneath the floor, from where even more heat is disappearing, seems the best way to make the house cozy and warm.

And so it begins...

This is the before picture...but then we wait and wait. We're told the work will start 'next week' but strangely this phrase doesn't mean what we thought it might.

One thing is clear though. Our house has walls that start high above ground level, it is a bungalow on stilts, so scaffolding has to be erected before anything can start.

Then without warning one day a lorry turns up and a few hours later the view out of our windows changes.

It occurs to us that once work starts we must be prepared to have workmen peering in from outside so when emerging from the shower, for example, an element of caution will be required.

Our house stands out due to its high position poised above the harbour. Anyone glancing upwards now and it is the pointed bristles of the supporting poles that catch the eye.

There's no hiding what is going on, even from a distance the scaffolding is visible so the whole village will be keen to see what happens next, as indeed are we. But a week goes by and still there's no sign of any insulation going on.

Oh, but wait a minute. What's that van outside. Plumbers? Early one morning there's a team of fit young men are making alterations to our gutter drainage pipes so the insulation can be fitted on. This is promising. And then we hear from George, our contract manager for the project, who tells us work will start next week. Now where have I heard that before?

One surprise was when a couple of very pleasant chaps started unloading stacks of insulation materials onto our garden, then coming back with another load which they stacked up on the roadside. (Some of this was later picked up by a gust of wind and scattered across the road, before being retrieved by some helpful neighbours.) It certainly looks like all this stuff could keep the house warm if it were stuck onto our walls so I suppose we should be grateful for this.

Another van, a white one, pulls up outside and a young man emerges, smiling broadly. With his strong Scottish accent he tells us he alone will be screwing the insulating panels to our walls, and for the next day and a half, despite the torrential rain showers, that is what he does. Inside the house the noise of his drilling is deafening but the speed he works is impressive so we do not complain. The next morning he is back and so is the rain, continuous and heavy. By lunchtime he is tired and wet but he has only one wall left to do.

Our house gradually disappears behind a layer of grey polystyrene and granules from where the panels have been sawn and shaped cover the ground outside. But this is only part one. There's much more to come.

Wrapping up the house - 2

Stage two of the wrapping up process involves adding a coat of render, sometimes known as pebbledash, outside of the insulation to make the house look clean and new as well as giving it lasting protection against the elements. This is a messy process and since we still need to see through the windows these are covered with some protective blue plastic which can be peeled off later.

The effect of this on us inside the house is quite strange. It changes our skin colour and makes us look ill.

Two layers of render are trowelled on and before the second coat is dry, handfuls of small stones are thrown at it, most of which embed themselves and stick on to leave a rough, external surface. Unsurprisingly this process ends up with the ground all around the house looking like a shingle beach but the net effect on the walls is another change of colour, very pleasing to the eye. We feel sorry for the two guys doing this work while wind and rain lash down on them in varying amounts but they don't complain.

Our garden becomes a workplace for cutting some new window cills, whilst clonking noises from around the house suggests there are other bits being finished off. In all it is a full week during which we have confined ourselves inside our blue tinted house.

But we are not idle. Not daring to venture outside with handfuls of stones being thrown about and scaffolding bars to bash our heads on we decide to tackle the kitchen ceiling, the first stage in a planned full-on revamp. We begin by attaching a narrow aluminium shelf to the walls around the perimeter some twenty centimetres below the existing ceiling. This has to be perfectly level, even though the ceiling itself is decidedly not, as it supports aluminium runners which stretch from one end of the room to the other, spaced at precise intervals, and then cross pieces which go from side to side. Further support comes from wires suspended from brackets screwed into the ceiling.

All this is done carefully with precise measuring as the grid of squares supports shiny new panels, three of which provide bright white light once they are connected up.

This whole process takes three full days, at the end of which we have achieved a remarkable transformation. We can hardly believe our eyes. The light panels are so bright that even the blue light coming through the window is overcome. We have hidden a messy uneven ceiling with a smooth, clean structure suspended below it. Stage one of the kitchen master plan is complete.

And no sooner is this done when suddenly the blue plastic is peeled away (it has done its job) so daylight once again floods in. We now have insulated and watertight walls such as the house has never seen before. There's just one further job to do now. We have insulation above us in the roof and around us outside the walls but beneath the house there is a well ventilated space with only our carpets to stop the cold air coming up from below. To cure this we need insulation, more of it, and this is the final part of the plan.

It seems everything must happen in one busy week as no sooner are the walls done when another van stops outside, this one being full of mineral fibre which is unrolled then pinned up from below to the underside of our floors, held in place by netting. It is not a pleasant job - we feel sorry for the two men working on this - but it takes only a few hours and they are done. Finally we have a cozy house.

Surely nothing else can happen to enhance our lives in this one hectic week. Or so we thought...

It is four months now since we used up the last whiff of gas from the tank in the front garden. Since then we have been keen to have the rusty old thing removed, a service only the gas supplier can provide.

This week it happened and it has been captured on video as The Flying Tank.

Free house

Our garden delivers surprises every day. Things emerge from below ground in unexpected places. We've had a swathe (or should it be a host) of daffodils pop up right across the back garden, appearing from nowhere. Maybe some of these were deliberately planted but so many suggests that they have been multiplying on their own for many years.

Then from the bare, brown, stick-like branches of a small tree growing beside the house, spring has brought out a spread of white flowers which later gave way to tiny green blobs, nascent cherries. Elsewhere the grass we expected by now to be long overdue for a trim has barely appeared at all. Instead in many places there is a carpet of moss, a mix of different species, all of which is beautifully soft to walk on. Just about anywhere around the garden there are now green fronds of bracken popping up, an indicator back to what the land once was, a wet woodland habitat. The rotting stumps of the long gone trees are still dotted about, almost hidden from view by the moss and now finally by the tall stems of wild grasses and dandelion flowers which are starting to give us the wild look we love.

Then another surprise. For our dinner one night Kate makes us a rhubarb crumble, the stalks having miraculously sprouted up from the ground in several places we hadn't expected. Perhaps it was all this plant life that we really paid for, the house being thrown in for free.

Now we can see what is already growing we can get a better idea of what new planting we would like to add into the mix and also what we do not want to encourage. Having trimmed back the bramble jungle when we first moved in, we know that their sturdy roots will likely always be with us. But perhaps we can let them flourish in one or two corners, albeit in a managed way, whilst trying to snip off the new growth elsewhere as soon as it appears. Bramble does, after all, have one agreeable habit; it produces rather tasty berries.

What we have discovered is probably a close relative of the hated bramble, masses of it cover the steeper, rocky areas of the garden. It is wild strawberry. The berries that are now appearing are tiny, like small red peas, and most will probably end up as bird food but these small plants provide ground cover and this in turn will help to exclude the bramble beast.

Rhododendron, however, particularly Rhododendron Ponticum, is not welcome. This plant is not native to Scotland so it doesn't belong in our country and we have no qualms about showing these shrubs just how brutal we can be although, as it has some remarkable survival strategies, it may take years to eliminate it completely. It can send branches horizontally along the ground then put down new roots and create a whole new plant some distance away which will survive even if the parent is cut down. It also creates so much shade beneath its evergreen leaves that nothing else can grow. So it's chop, chop, chop to the Rhodies.

Our small and rather battered greenhouse is already providing a home for some tomato plants and soon, we hope, will house a variety of edible plants that would struggle outdoors in our climate and would certainly be gobbled up by the hungry slugs that share the garden with us. 

Then, of course, there is the pond. All we did was dig a hole, line it with plastic and fill it with water but very quickly this has become home to a mass of insect life, creatures that have made their own way there, by air we assume. First to arrive were the pond skaters, creatures that live on top of the water's surface, catching and eating any other insect that is unfortunate enough to fall in and get stuck in the surface tension. The skaters seem to spend the whole day fighting each other (unless I am misinterpreting this) so perhaps they find our pond rather too boring. Meanwhile beneath the water we have countless beetles who skull themselves around like tiny oarsmen and clinging just under the surface are gnat larvae, breathing air through the tiny hole they have made in the surface skin. We are probably responsible for adding to the Scottish midge population too but this is how the wild world works, it is not our place to interfere. The pond is gradually becoming more cloudy with algae, food for something no doubt, and we did import a few clumps of weed from another pond which are surviving as floating rafts from which fresh stalks are now appearing. It seems the roots of these plants take nourishment from the water itself which must mean we have created a reasonably healthy environment.

We find the process of natural rewilding so fascinating that we have a little seat arranged close by so we can sit and watch the changes from day to day and observe the behaviour of the wild things that have chosen to live with us. We take pleasure from giving them a home but try not to interfere. We know that in the current dry spell the water level will drop but it would be wrong to top up with tap water as this risks poisoning one or other of our little friends. So we leave it alone and let nature do what it's good at.

Last wisps of gas

We have now been living in our new home for a little over six months... so perhaps we should no longer refer to it this way. But part of the reason it still feels new is that there is so much we want to change about the place to make it feel like it is ours. Decoratively we have stripped the paper from a few walls, opened up some internal spaces we had no need for and of course we have completed The Bathroom Project. Redecorating the whole house to our own taste is definitely going to happen at some point but  something prevents us doing more at this juncture. It is the heating system, the LPG gas boiler, which we want to change to an air source heat exchanger. Having been through this process in our previous house (in that case discarding an oil boiler) we know that this will mean some serious disruption as the new pipework and radiators are installed so it would be premature to decorate any rooms before this is done.

The tank of gas that came with the house has served us well by providing hot water and central heating for over six months. But then one day, inevitably (25th March to be precise), we drew off the very last gasp of propane. We had already decided, believing that the long process of getting a new heating system would soon deliver, that we would not top up the tank with more gas when this happened so that was the moment our taps ran cold. No more hot showers and with cold radiators our house became one in which we suffered chilly mornings until our small multi-fuel stove could be lit and our tiny electric fan heater started blowing warm air. Getting out of bed from under our warm duvet became a challenge as this was winter, spring was weeks away, and whilst our high-on-the-hill position might give us the best view for miles around it is also a windy spot, heat being sucked quickly away when the wind blows. So we developed coping mechanisms to get us through. We apologised to our visitors for the lack of comfort, we threw more logs on the fire and when a hot shower opportunity elsewhere did come our way we grabbed it with both hands. Fortunately there were sunny days and we discovered the house had a bonus feature, the south facing conservatory, which traps the sun's rays and converts them into heat. Open the connecting door into the house and some of this warmth changes places with the colder air inside, bringing relief for a few hours until the sun drops behind the hill for the night.

April brought the first traces of spring and longer days brought warmth too, not every day, but often enough for us to carry on. Thermal vests and thick jumpers do work, so we discovered. Then finally we had a visit from our heating installer, something we'd been pushing for, and the words that came out of his mouth caught us completely by surprise.

"We can do you next Tuesday," he said. "Would that be ok?"

At first we thought we might have misheard him but then we realised he was serious. Perhaps our sorry state had rang his sympathy bell but whatever it was we could hardly believe that in just a few days our lives would be changing, for the better.

So it was that exactly one month after the last wisp of gas squeezed its way out of the tank in our front garden there was a line up of vans outside from which emerged more plumbers and electricians than you could shake a stick at. Large white packages (our new radiators) were carried up the steps through our front door and lengths of shiny new copper pipe disappeared into the space beneath the house. Before we knew it our present heating system was disappearing out the door, the boiler included (I didn't even get the chance to wave it farewell) and rumbling noises from beneath the house pointed to the old pipes being cut out. 

We tried to keep out of the way; it was a cool and breezy day so with the house doors open to allow access we hunkered down in front of our stove to preserve our body heat.

It took four strong men to lift the new air source heating unit up from the road and onto the prepared base at the rear of the house but once this was connected up it did at least look like we might have heat by the end of the day. However it was then we were told that the wrong cylinder had been ordered, too big to fit in our kitchen cupboard space, so by close of play we had new (bigger) radiators in every room, loads of shiny new copper plumbing but still no hot water. For this we would have to be more patient. 

Two days later the plumber returned, and he brought with him a fresh set of muscles.

 These were soon deployed to lift the water cylinder up from road level.

It is hard to believe that this is the smaller, slimline model, but when we see it installed in our kitchen cupboard an hour or so later we realise why the bigger one would not fit.

The cupboard that was once home to a nice looking gas central heating boiler now has a tall insulated cylinder, a couple of expansion vessels (squashed into the top) and a control panel that looks like it could run a starship. There are also several interesting looking white boxes, one of which seems able to talk to my phone using the house wi-fi. Naturally this is the first gadget I am keen to get working as soon as the new heating system is up and running and couple of hours later, after we say farewell our workmen, I am communicating electronically with the new beast.

More importantly though, for the first time in over a month we have heat in the house and a bathroom shower that delivers hot water. We can't wait to get under it.