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.