Out with the old

Our living room was always going to be a big decorating project for us. Every surface needed attention, changing from the before - patterned, papered walls which we hated, a faded painted ceiling and a hideous, ancient, patterned carpet on the floor - to the after, which is our own taste in plain coloured walls, a freshly painted ceiling, the mural across one wall and our own choice of floor, which is not carpet. Having finished work on our lovely new kitchen and with our energies recharged, we always knew that decorating the living room would follow.

Stripping the wallpaper from the walls revealed a host of patchwork repairs that needed covering up but logic dictates that we start at the top, the ceiling, so white paint is rolled on, splashing everything beneath with fine droplets, which we knew would happen and was why we started at the top. Skirting boards around the room are given a fresh coat of paint after peeling back the carpet, the folded over edges of which have been nailed firmly down to the floor, a strange way to fasten a carpet. This reveals some gaps through which cold draughts come whistling up from under the house when it is blowing hard outside, not what we need, so thick beads of sealant are applied to seal the gaps and make the room more airtight. This will likely need more attention when our floor covering goes down, the finishing touch.

Walls are next, the mural (which has already been revealed here) is followed by fresh but plain coloured wallpaper around the rest of the room. There are, as ever, some awkward bits - around the edges of the windows where odd shapes require tricky trimming - but generally the work progresses smoothly over several days. Whilst working on the job the focus tends to be on the next piece, or the next cut, and it is only when the last piece goes up that we suddenly stand back and admire what we have created. So long as one's eyes are blind to the still carpeted floor we have a room that reflects our tastes, simple and bold.

Christmas intervenes with our son Ben and his wife Naomi coming to stay but without their cat, Toby, who is not a good traveller.

Although left home alone we can keep watch on him via a live video link and he seems perfectly relaxed as he wanders about the house and garden.

After Christmas we collect our laminate flooring from the shop then have to carry the ten heavy boxes up the steps to our front door, a task that leaves us gasping for breath and trembly at the knees, so we sit down and do some planning. The strategy for laying the floor involves shuffling large items of furniture across from one side of the room to the other then back again as we lay the flooring in rows across the room. The (horrible) carpet must first be lifted to reveal what we have never seen, the wooden floor boards below, but this can be done in sections with the furniture then being lifted back onto each completed section of the new floor. A small crane might help with this but in its absence muscle power will have to do. Just like with the kitchen rebuild once we start the job we must cope with disruption to our normal pattern of day to day behaviour so the sooner we can finish the better. 

The end of the second day of laying the new laminate flooring sees a sizeable chunk finished. We now have a sequence of moves worked out for each line of planks running across the room from end to end so in theory the rest of the job should go smoothly. As each section of carpet is sliced from end to end, rolled up and taken away it reveals a horrible mix of underlay, some of which has perished into black crumbs and then in another area there's a thick woolly material that looks older than the house itself. The only element that is consistent across the room is that each piece of underlay is nailed to the floor with long carpet tacks or staples all of which must be prized free before work can begin. As one might expect, laying a new floor is pretty tough on the knees too. Nothing is ever simple.

On the positive side the history of the house hidden under the old carpet that is revealed to us is like being on an archeological dig.

Strange scribblings on the floor boards like these must have had some meaning to someone years ago, just as a cave painting would have done to a neolithic hunter. We can only guess at what the writer was trying to tell us. But finally the last plank is laid, the rolled up slices of the hated carpet are carried off to the tip and the history beneath our feet is once again hidden from view. All that remains is to fix an edging trim around the room to cover the expansion gap needed on all laminate floors but visually the job is done. Every last piece of that hated carpet has become landfill.

Looking over the transformation we have brought about it suddenly hits us. Unexpectedly we now have an almost perfect carbon copy of the living room we created in our Carradale home. Some things in life are just not worth changing.

Seagulls & mice

We are well aware that we don't always follow convention when it comes to home decor. Nobody has actually told us this to our faces but we have noticed the expressions of horror, quickly hidden away, on the faces of those visiting.

When we started looking online for wallpaper to put up in our living room we were drawn to something we had tried in our previous house, a mural. For a time we considered painting the wall, something exciting, a work of art that might be visible from the street, but in the end we settled for this sunrise and its five seagulls, made to measure from strips of wallpaper. It is both unusual and quite dramatic, something more usually associated with a public space and therefore unexpected in a home setting. We do not follow convention. For the rest of the living room we have gone for plain colours and finally, at 1205 on Wednesday 13th December, we finished fixing the last strip of wallpaper. A big tick, job done.

Winter is now upon us and a recent cold spell made us grateful for the extra insulation we have had placed around and beneath the house during the last year. This even includes the new central heating pipes running under the floor which have foam tubes around them to keep the heat in. But the question is, for how much longer? The first thing we noticed were the tiny granules of insulation material scattered about in the undercroft (or basement, as some would call it), a clear indication that we have some small visitors. Rodents like field mice will try to find somewhere warmer to hang out in winter, something we would not object to but for their nest building habits. Having gone to such lengths to insulate our rather leaky house it sort of rubs us up the wrong way to think that it is being chewed up to keep a few mice cosy, so eventually we decided to resort to setting traps for them. We chose a humane solution, one that merely captures the creatures inside a metal cage, but sadly the first tiny rodent we found had passed away by morning after eating all the bait inside the cage. (We like to think he was rather elderly and suffered a heart failure.) But on a positive note it did save us the job of carrying him somewhere far away to release him. He was not, however, the field mouse we had expected. This little fellow was a vole, a creature that does not normally make a habit of moving into a house, or so we are told.

The following morning vole No.2 was shuffling around inside one of the traps and this brought into play our release strategy. A ten minute walk away from us we have a wild area, a bit of rainforest woodland, where we like to think a vole will be able to live a long and fruitful life. Here, the cage door is opened and, after a few seconds deep thought, No.2 scuttled off into the wood, disappearing from sight as he dived under the fallen leaves.

The next day this little fellow was tempted into the trap, a field mouse. Again we took him for a walk and opened up the cage on the ground, the doorway to his new world.  Just how many of these tiny creatures will be lured into our baited traps only time will tell. It turns out that they don't like peanut butter - who'd have thought it! - but each one caught means that our underfloor pipe insulation survives a little longer. If we had a dog, which we don't, we'd be taking it for a walk every morning, like most owners do. Rehoming the rodents by walking them to somewhere wild is our own version of this. These tiny creatures may prefer to be inside someone's house in cold weather and the woodland may present something of a challenge to them. For this I apologise profusely but I'm sure they would do the same in my position.

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.