And then the roof trusses arrived.

Note the number of trusses in this bundle and particularly the 2 that are beyond the end of the teleporter forks. We unloaded them exactly as the lorry drivers told us to but I bet you can guess what happened when they were laid on the ground and I'll bet you know who the manufacturer said was responsible for damage during unloading. It's pretty amazing what support they think 2 plastic bands provide. Oh, and this is a medium sized batch. The second lorry full was made up of only 2 bundles, again secured by 2 plastic bands. Suffice to say that we broke a couple more trusses and it was our fault again. If you would like to show how it should be done I can provide the manufacturer's details so you can get a couple of lorry-loads for your house.

The problem was not helped when it took a week to get the manufacturers to start the remedial work. After the initial delay this means that the trusses have caused a total of nearly 3 weeks so far with no indication of when the remedial bits will arrive.

While I had the pleasure of progressing the trusses the walls were getting up to wall head in readiness for the trusses.

Could this be the start of Radio Murkle?

And that it when the support pole is removed.

In those last 2 pictures we have started to cut the BECO bricks to produce the skew courses on the gable ends. The following is a CAD drawing converted to an image to illustrate how many variables there were in working out where the wall head is in relation to the concrete in the gable. We tried it with sketches, we tried it with a set of real bricks in the portacabin and it still wasn't making sense. The CAD did the trick.

Eventually we made a decision and cut the bricks on the outside (103mm out from the red- slate - line) but left the inner polystyrene till we had a truss up against the gable to get the level accurate. That cut was to the lower of uppermost red line pairs if you see what I mean. The 25 degree red line pair was to show the angle of the bottom slate.

which is a subset of the whole roof. We used this drawing to estimate the height of the apex including tiles but below the skew course.

so that eventually it began to look like a house with just a hint of a roof.

and along the South side

and in between the 2 wings

and this is how it looks at the wall head.

It is Thursday 14th September and it has been raining steadily for several hours so the main squad have gone home leaving one poor devil in full oilskins hammering **** out of the concrete skip to clean it up before it goes off hire tomorrow.

Let's hope the weather improves!

Almost a month has passed and work has gone in fits and starts. The erection of the trusses and sarking, originally estimated as a week's work won't be finished this side of 4 weeks. And we have had a wind related incident or two.

Look at the hint of roof picture above and spot the difference between it and this one.

You got it! The west gable has disappeared. Well not exactly; it was lying on the floor in the living room and that was it FILLED with concrete. Caithnesian winds are strong.

Before...

and after.

.

The wind blew the scaffolding over too - and

and

No surprise then that the east gable went too! At least it wasn't full of concrete.

So it was built up again to its former glory.

But, a couple of weeks later, when work stopped on the Friday afternoon with a strong wind forecast you really would think that lessons had been learned but, on Saturday morning.

.

Off stage musings of an assisted self builder; now we have to build it up for the third time! There has to be a lesson.

Standing back from the catastrophes the building is beginning to take shape and the view West is now

and from much the same point looking East through the kitchen and towards the accommodation is

The guest bedrooms are in here

Yes, all of them so it isn't a huge building really.

The view from the workroom towards the garage is

and the roof above this and the garage is

which should be an end to our storage problems! And that's the smaller roof space so maybe it is a bigger building than I was allowing myself to believe.

The windows are due next week and, as we are so far behind schedule we will have to be creative about fitting them. Meanwhile after much searching for a local slater we have gone for a 'lots of people' approach to minimise the time it will take. Unfortunately we will have to ship a squad in over the border every day, and out again at close of play but the local small firms couldn't respond quickly enough and the days are getting colder and wetter as well as shorter.

To be continued. 10th October 2006

It's now the 1st of November and the weather is casuing more problems but it wasn't always so.

During the excavation for the foundations we chanced upon an old sandstone roller which we decided would look appropriate with the house name on it so Susan (daughter) and Andrew (husband) rose to the challenge, identified a font and printed out the words East, Murkle and Croft to the correct scale and in the correct font and we approached a local engraver to do the necessary. The engraver marked up the roller in pencil and then, fortunately, called us back to check before he went ahead because the font was nothing like the one we had specified and much more like a typical gravestone than the version on the bits of paper. Suffice to say that after a repeat performance Andrew took it upon himself to make a stencil out of the scaled printouts and laminated it with the film that's use to cover books. This time the engraver got it right and the result is

We still have to get the graphite off and make the text a bit more visible, and make a plinth for it to go on, and make a matching axle for the left hand end. Seems like even the small jobs grow wings.

There was a major lump of wood to be fitted just below the apex of the trusses in the kitchen/living section of the house where there is a "cathedral" ceiling. The beam is 10.5m long and about 0.5m wide and, as it had to fed in to the ceiling from the west end it was causing quite a lot of concern. You can see the wooden pillar to support one end of it behind the scaffolding in the picture 5 above here. As we also had to do some landscaping (or perhaps mudscaping would be more accurate) we were able to borrow a 12 tonne digger from a local farmer and suddenly the job was relatively straightforward. Unfortunately I couldn't handle a camera and pull on my bnit of rope so there is no record of the beam being swung into the top of the building but here is a close up showing the half a fence post modification (the greenish bit) to spread the load at the top.

Now, as the big digger was available, I decided to try and improve the water run-off between the house and the barn where a lot of water was running off the higher ground and causing significant puddles which were quickly turned to a muddy goo by the passing traffic. Inkeeping with a lot of the rest of this build I promptly made matters worse

and spent a lot of the evening standing holding a lighting rig so that the guys from Scottish Water could fix the damage. The latest development is that instead of receiving a bill for the call-out I get a letter telling me that I had better start investigating who is liable and that they are gathering information to send me a bill. It did seem a bit un-necessary.

The windows arrived and now occupy a large part of the garage which now has doors;

but, to be truthful they were a day late and were fitted the day after the windows arrived so there was a temporary erection made of sarking board and damp proof polythene membrane for a night.

By now the weather was making life difficult and the ground so muddy that moving the teleporter around to fit the front dormers required a tow from the mini-digger. It also pretty well destroyed several hours of landscaping at the front.

We went South on Thursday 26th of October to a family event in Edinburgh and the weather was atrocious. There was major precipitation which flooded several roads in the Highlands and svere winds which toppled many trees. They also moved a pile of insulation which had stood outside the portacabin and scattered the bits over several fields breaking every bit into small pieces on the way. Even the clean up became a problem as we couldn't get transport into the fields because the ground was sodden and the vehicles ended up having to be winched out. Just as a reminder about Cathnesian breezes here is the 'after' view. I'm not sure I can find a 'before' but I'll have a look.

And, just in case you thought I'd forgotten, we hadn't seen the buzzard for a while but yesterday we saw 2 and the one that took off ended up flying backwards in a Southerly direction. I'll have to wait for that better picture. The forecast is better for the end of the week so we might get some slates on and maybe a photo of the buzzard too.

Meanwhile the house looks like this from the North

and this from the West

The slaters might arrive later so I'm off to dress up warmly and help with some facia boards. 1st November 2006