We now have a bed and a washing machine. Tremendous improvement all round.
The washing machine took me ages to find – I wanted one that would work fine gravity-fed from the header tank 3 metres above it. Most modern washing machines specify a minimum of 1 bar of pressure for the feed, as that’s the least that a mains water utility company will deliver. Water from a well really doesn’t do that – 1 bar of pressure is 10m of head, which is very tricky to achieve in a single-storey cottage.
Anyway, the washing machine is really good (so far). It’s made by a New Zealand company called Fisher and Paykel, and works via direct drive so it’s very quiet (no belt or anything to contend with). An online company was selling off ex-display models, so that’s what we got. Unfortunately they missed a couple of components out (the manual and an inlet cap), but the former was available on the internet, and the latter from Homebase, so worked out fine.
We’ve continued to work at stacking turf but we’ve not made much of a dent in it yet. It rained yesterday for the first time in ages, but hopefully it’ll remain dry now to avoid putting ourselves under too much pressure.
Here are some pictures of the bog I took this evening – I was lining up shots of bog cotton against the bog wall and noticed that a rainbow had photo-bombed the frame so that’s in some of them too.
Due to popular demand, there are fewer shots of bits of turf this time 🙂