Domestic adventuring

Our new home is in a 'village' (despite it having multiple shops and an assortment of places to eat out) and as we continue to settle in, life here is beginning to capture us. We are determined, however, not to put ourselves forward for involvement in any local committees in order to avoid getting to where we were before we moved - having too many demands on our time so that our lives cease to be our own. I did recently put myself forward for a few hours physical labour, shifting and spreading gravel at the community-owned castle, a historic monument, and welcomed this opportunity to meet up with a few locals, which is fine, but this is as far as I'll take it. Aching muscles is something I can handle, something we can both control.

We are also controlling the pace of the house projects fairly well. Here at home this is what our kitchen wall looked like as the electrician was putting in some new wires and the associated sockets so that we can use our new electric cooker, the gas one having been taken out and given away locally to someone who had a need for it. The square shaped holes in the picture are a necessary part of what an electrician does when he has to feed new wires up from beneath the house. Patching the holes up again is a necessary part of what we have to do to make the house as we want it but this will take time so we can expect to be living with these holes for some time as the kitchen renovation slowly takes shape. 

With the electrics done a cooker hood is screwed to the wall and trunking fed off the top into our attic space where it is connected to an existing roof vent to carry away all our cooking smells. This all sounds very simple but it required imagination, some large drills and the ability to survive in a dusty environment, the attic, my least favourite part of the house.

The solution, however, is innovative, practical, and is typical of the way we are bringing our own ideas into play. Of course it will mean that with the right wind the whole village may be able to smell what we are cooking, but we can live with that.

Next on our time line, we hope, will be the fuel that heats our house. We have a gas central heating boiler but being where we live, in a very rural location, there is no piped gas main buried under the road outside. Instead the stuff is delivered periodically by lorry which discharges liquid propane into a pressurised tank located in our front garden. This does not fit well with our views on green energy and neither is it the cheapest way to heat the house so this is something we want to change, just as we did in our previous house, where the fuel was oil.

Some months ago we contacted a company that specializes in installing air-source heating systems and since then we have been pursuing Scottish government funding to help us afford to make the change. The application process is complex and would be daunting to many - long periods of waiting on the phone to speak to an advisor, complex emails and lots of legal jargon have to be negotiated before eventually we have a successful outcome. Soon we shall have a start date for what will be a major transformation for the house, something we were determined to achieve from the day we moved in.

We have another ambition too. Beyond our back fence is a hill which on the map is called Cnoc a' Bhuic, although for some reason it is known locally as the Uridgh. On top of the hill is a concrete pillar, an Ordnance Survey trig point, again shown on the map, but this is a wild place and it is not easy of access due to the dense vegetation on the lower slopes. However there is a rather intriguing gate in our back fence. So might there be a path up the hill from there? 

This is the straight line route.

Our first exploratory forays reveal that to reach the more open ground higher up we must first hack our way through a dense jungle of gorse, bramble and rhododendron, beneath which is very squidgy mud. Oh, and there's a steep-sided burn to cross before even arriving at the steeper bit. 

So, by deploying a couple of washing line poles we create a bridge across the burn (no more muddy wading) and since this solution fails to scare one of our younger visitors it must be ok. Cutting through all the dense vegetation takes a massive effort (even with the assistance of a chain saw), but with each attempt we get higher and higher up the hill and after numerous spells of hacking and chopping we eventually have a route through to the bracken-covered upper slopes.

Having made it this far we find faint tracks with hoof prints in the soft ground which tells us there are animals, sheep or deer, roaming about here. We can expect that with the coming of Summer there will be new bracken growth covering everything and this will make route finding on the hill very much harder, so we are keen to make some sort of a path now and then use it regularly to keep it clear. We also need to lay down some route markers since, once having climbed out of the denser vegetation, we suddenly realise that it is extremely difficult to find the route down again. It may be hard to believe but it is definitely possible to get lost in the wilderness which lies just beyond our own back garden.

One of our higher forays was in the company of some of our friends' children and we discovered a small cave, clearly used as a shelter by the animals who live up there. 

The view from inside is spectacular but we doubt this is why the animals visit it.

At the time of writing those words we had yet to make it to the summit... but then another sunny day came along and we went for it, a summit push. 

The actual route, tracked on my phone as we ascended and returned, was definitely not a straight line and on our descent we chose a slightly easier route, one involving less scrambling. It is not an easy climb and navigating the route down again is equally hard, risky even, since once the ill defined path is lost, finding it again is a real challenge.

The evidence of our achievement is here, the owl pellet on the top of the trig point showing that the wind was not strong but it was extremely cold so we did not linger on the summit. There were views in all directions but nothing beat looking to the west, along West Loch Tarbert and out to the Atlantic beyond.

The Great Bathroom Adventure - episode 4

Bathroom flooring day finally arrives, on schedule, and a layer of red stuff now covers the rather messy bare timber floor. It is waterproof, tough and non slip, contrasting with the walls and adding a splash of warmth to this room. A quick call is made to Malcolm, our plumber, for him to come and finish off, to install the toilet, a sink, and a new radiator and several days later he arrives, spanners in hand. 

The final result is worth the wait, lots of contrast between the pale colours on the walls and the black furniture. And yes, that's a blue whale providing some marine interest.

Or to put it another way, here's the before and after...

So this is the first of our planned room-sized projects done and dusted. Others will follow, some big, some more cosmetic but an end is nowhere in sight. What it does mean is that our focus can shift elsewhere, outdoors even, where unexpected things are happening.

With the lengthening days, surprises are appearing in our garden. 

From beneathour mossy grass things hidden underground are emerging in large numbers, green at first,  and then these begin to acquire yellow buds which soon open into flowers. Daffodils have always been predictors of spring and now we know that the bulbs are there we will always look forward to seeing them emerge from the sloping plain that is our garden. It is also nice to think that such beauty came free with the house, so we're not complaining.

Less attractive, however, is the continuing discovery of rubbish thrown away by previous inhabitants of our house and now also appearing from beneath our back garden as we dig about. This reflects an attitude that is beyond our understanding.