02 Aug 2013

Charlie

A long day Charlie, one of our cats, was ill this week. Luckily, after a course of homeopathic treatment he's much better. But we didn't want to leave him overnight so we got up bright and early and headed to the 'ship for a days work, planning to leave there at 9pm. With leaving here at 8am that made for a veeery long day. But we got a lot done.

Skylights

After last weeks, er, hiccup, with one of the skylights we were very careful when cleaning and siliconing in place the other one. As you can see from the photos, the birds have pooped on it already - isn't that meant to be lucky?!!

Skylight glass siliconed in place

Then we worked on the triangular skylight for the dome. Because it's up so high (and tricky to get up there) we've decided to try out super insulated polycarbonate. It has a square structure filled with about 16 layers for extra insulation and is much lighter than glass. Last week we slightly reworked the wood frame so it fitted flush with the top, then siliconed it in place. This week we cut the metal drip edge flashing and screwed it in place. It needed a bit of jiggery pockery with the corners and we mistakenly siliconed it to seal the edge between the polycarbonate and the metal which was a nightmare to clean. I've just looked at the books and it's not necessary to do this, it just needs silicone along the inside edge, so we won't be doing that on the glass skylights, phew.

Polycarbonate in skylight

Folded over metal corner

More tyres

A local carpenter came to give us a quote for preparing the front face wooden frame to take the big sheets of glass. He's also going to source the glass. We're hoping to get the order for the glass in before the factory closes for August.

We did get a quote from a different company that we were going to use but they never came back to us with a time to come and measure, so we've had to give up on them.

Anyway, once it had cooled down a bit, we thumped more tyres.

4-5 Aug 2013

Because we only did a day last week (and because Charlie is back to his old self) we decided to do an evening and morning of tyre work, staying overnight so we could work until 9pm when the sun goes down and start at 7am before it comes up.

In just 5 hours (evening and morning) we did 12 tyres, with a 13th prepared and partly filled. This is a record for us. Although the books say you can do 4 an hour this has remained a dream for us. So we're mightily chuffed with an average of nearly 3 an hour! And that includes wheel barrowing the soil from a fair distance away.

On the subject of breaking records, we also managed to get 21 tyres in the boot of the car when we did a trip out to our local garage. Our most before was 18.

The wall taking shape

Darth Vader

I mentioned the Blue Peter style 'shed' we constructed last week without taking any photos of the final thing. So here it is.

As we were coming over the hill I caught a glimpse of it and it so reminded me of a grim reaper figure. A dark and ominous presence - eeek! So instead of dwelling on that I thought I'd name it Darth Vader to give it a, um, cheerier note. I think it's the sloping back that does it, oh and the mass of black of course.