Another huge gap in blog entries, and this time I’m not going to back-fill them. The past couple of years have been pretty brutal, and I’m not mad keen to re-visit them more than I already have, even in the form of light and breezy entries with pictures of animals and unfinished renovation items.
Well ok, I might. But not now.
Highlights (you may get cheery posts accompanying these):
Got a shipping container.
Installed a polytunnel and we grew a lot of crops.
Finished building the well pump house walls, a door, and most of the roof.
Got a well water filter installed – no more brown staining or e.coli (probably).
Got rid of the barn roof and all the junk the barn used to contain.
Got some chairs, a sofa, and a table.
Took custody of an old, manky-nosed, deaf, blind and cranky cat. He was ace.
Put up some outdoor lights.
Some of the not-highlights:
Didn’t get to feed the cows this year.
Mostly trapped in Ireland.
Had to have the cat fecked over into the meadow at the rainbow bridge, where he’s probably up to no good.
Sorting out the foundations went ok. They were wildy wrong, but I have used the experience as an opportunity to learn and grow:
F-irst
A-ttempt
I-n
L-earning
To be clear, I absolutely don’t believe that as a concept. I learnt some years ago that being careful and precise saves time overall. I’m just not patient enough to avoid doing myself over every time!
I’ll stay up with you / By your side ’til you repair — Not my words, but those of the “Sartres of Sligo”: Westlife
Today’s apology for a lyric headline is from Kate Nash’s “Foundations”. Who knew that in a matter of 10 years she’d go from performing live on Jools Holland to being one of the stars of Netflix women’s wrestling drama GLOW? I digress…
So as optimistic as I was at my first building activity, I waited for the foundations to dry, then put the blocks in roughly the place they would be.
I know it’s not right
Somewhere along the (wonky) line, I must have moved the markers I was using to denote the bounds of the area. I’d done the measurements last autumn, so plenty of scope for that to have happened.
I ended up with foundations to cover three blocks’ worth one side, and four the other. The bottom-right of the above photo illustrates the slight issue.
It does look a bit ridiculous that I didn’t notice as I was doing it, but I really didn’t. I have attempted to remedy the situation by extending the foundations out further – it’ll end up not needing a floor at this rate.
Hoping that the weekend weather will permit progress, but I’m concerned at the prospect of rain and freezing weather again. Apparently the water in concrete can freeze (and consequently expand) in freshly-poured concrete, which messes it up badly.
I have been mentally building a well pump house extension for some months now. Unfortunately, this hasn’t caused the project to actually happen… until now. The water from our well is undrinkable (see previous post). We’d ideally like to be able to drink it, and also not have its ridiculously high manganese content stain stuff. Removal of E. coli is on our “nice to have” list, too.
I spoke to a water filtration company last year and paid a deposit to get the system I wanted. It’s a Strong Acidic Cation setup, which should remove water hardness and manganese. They’re going to supply a UV filter too, so bye-bye E. coli.
One of the complications of filtration for our well is that anything capable of removing all of the crud from the water also needs to be able to clean itself out frequently, so the filtration medium doesn’t just get clogged-up. This is called “backwash”, and involves sending a lot of water back the other way through the filter (at speed) to eject the bad stuff.
As also previously mentioned, our well is not… err… well-endowed on the water yield front. So the backwash setup needs a holding tank and a booster pump to do the job. Which require more space than the current tiny pump house can provide. Hence the grand extension plan.
One other thing to note is that the backwash has to go somewhere. As luck would have it, there’s a plastic drainage pipe below the planned extension, so I used a hole saw to drill into it. The backwash can then go into that and wend its merry way down to a convenient ditch.
The existing pump house is (imperial measurements ahoy…) 8ft x 5ft (so about 2.4m x 1.5m). I can’t remember how tall it is, except to say that the existing pressure tank has the corrugated iron ‘roof’ resting on it, so it’s not tall. Maybe 3ft (under a metre)?
The planned extension makes the pump house wider than it is long (green shading is new part):
We dug out the foundations a while ago, and today was promised to be a dry one for pouring the foundations.
Brand new cement mixer, foundations and existing pump house with fetching roof
A mere four hours and a *lot* of concrete later, the foundations are done:
Foundations complete
I mixed the concrete 1 (cement) : 3 (sand) : 5 (aggregate). I don’t really know what I’m doing, but a builder told me to use that mix so I did.
The foundations need to set for a few days before the block work can be started.
Blocks
Visible stuff left-to-right: 1 tonne bag of sand, 176 4″ blocks, 1 tonne bag of gravel, some other chip and dust bag left over from the spare room floor work. Will probably end up in the pump house extension flooring.
Like the zombie mink of Denmark, the blog returns to life once more to herald the dawn of a brand new year. The delay was to check whether or not 2021 was a significant upgrade on 2020. Turns out, it isn’t.
Since my last post, not a whole lot has happened. Well, nothing good anyway.
Highlights of past 6 months:
Feeding the cows.
Collecting the cows’ output and spreading it on the garden.
Putting up another two curtain rails. I can only apologise that you missed the live stream of this work – very much a fusion of film d’auteur melancholy and Tarantinoesque splatter cartoon.
Collecting seaweed and spreading it on the garden.
Not only has the paint stripper arrived, but the very long-awaited rake handle did too.
Fully-assembled rake
As you can imagine, raking is significantly easier with a 1.2m long handle attached. Ordered 27th April, arrived 5th May. Truly dark times we’re living in.
Obviously we’ve tried it out, and were both delighted with its ability to move bits of soil around from a distance. It is no overstatement to say that it has opened up a vast horizon of opportunities within the horticultural field, quite literally.
The weather got very cold again – walking on the bog, the sphagnum moss crunched underfoot, unlike its usual squelchy/springy response.
Frosty moss
The light was exceptionally bright though – the first field benefitted from it a lot:
Sunny rushes
By far the most exciting event of the day was the arrival of a new fridge/freezer. We’d been getting by for months with an electric (Peltier) coolbox, but with great uncertainly on the horizon with COVID-19, we thought replacing the old broken fridge/freezer would be a sensible option.
Since a lot of the companies don’t know how much longer they’re going to be able to trade, the one we chose bent over backwards to fulfil the order. I phoned them and paid them, and the fridge was with us less than three hours later. They took away the old one too (thanks to the genius of the EU’s WEEE legislation from 2008). The new one is a Beko, as they seem to be one of the only companies that produce fridge/freezers that are designed to be ok in unheated rooms (which the kitchen often is), and had one short enough to fit under the slightly esoteric kitchen cabinet layout we have.
New Beko fridge freezer
The evening light was amazing too… some very cheery shepherds I imagine:
In case you thought that the whole renovation project had hit the buffers, I present you with the work of art that is a curtain pole attached to a wall:
Once you’ve finished gazing in wonder at that, you’ll doubtless be asking yourself how it was secured, taking into account preservation of the vapour barrier, dry lining, DIY ineptitude, etc.
The answer is that it was a total pain in the arse, using those Gripit things that some child designed and got promoted following an appearance on Dragons’ Den. The tone of my previous sentence might offer some clue as to how much I’d recommend them.
As I’m writing this now in the future (23rd October 2019), I note that there’s been a story this week about how the company behind the evil hybrid of Rawlplug and Kinder Egg toy is teetering on the brink of insolvency.
The case for the karma police rests.
Apparently there should be a photo involving the curtains themselves. I think they detract from the craftsmanship of the curtain pole hanging, but for completeness:
To provide some context for those numbers, the bacteriological counts aren’t what anyone would hope for, but if they were taken from the sea at a beach, it’d still qualify for a blue flag. Which probably says more about the wisdom of not drinking seawater than it does the healthiness of our well.
