Water water everywhere...

but luckily it looks as if there will be a drop to drink.

Yesterday there was drilling on site (preceded by some dowsing, I believe, although that might just be West-Highland speak for standing around with a cup of tea and a biscuit and asking Alec Sutherland what he saw when he was driving the digger around the site) and the initial signs weren't good. Mention was made of "taking the water from the burn and sticking it in a holding tank and purifying it". Then they drilled a bit further and at 140m (I think) they struck water. About 15 gallons per hour, which is classed as fairly poor. That would also need to be put into a holding tank to make sure one could get through baths & showers & so on.

Today we had a message from the builders that the flow is now 80 gallons per hour, which is Much Better. That wouldn't need a holding tank, even. So looks like you'll be able to stay clean when you come to visit. Which is good.

A Roof is Not Necessarily Something That Keeps the Rain Out

The Roof is Going On

Livy drove all the way to the Wood and back today, so that we could see what building a house in midwinter in the Highlands looks like. Wet. As you can see from the pictures, there is a frame covered in a green plastic bag. This does little to keep the wood dry, in the present circumstances. There are some wonderful huge holes in the walls which will eventually be vast windows.

The main roof timbers are up and Stanley the joiner was damply balancing on the scaffolding constructing the lean-to roof at the back. When we arrived at lunchtime he had put the timbers for the shower room, the entrance hall and the utility room. As we were leaving he was beginning the bit over the woodstore, the water cupboard and the piano. There was sarking and roofing felt and windows in the south slope of the roof. Water was still penetrating around the edges there, though.

We were allowed in, which we thought was kind, given that the site belongs to the builders for the time being. The kitchen seems absolutely huge. The sitting room does, too; and there is room for two pianos in the piano extension. The downstairs bedroom seems to have plenty of space for two single beds and other necessary stuff. The ceilings seem nice and high, though this is a bit hard to gauge when the floor is an unknown amount below its final level and the ceiling consists simply of joists.

I am not totally sure that the right Velux windows have actually arrived; and I did rather wonder if gathers in the external plastic bags is something done in the best circles; but this is not something about which I can comment. (Though I suppose Mary might.)

In general, I was very happy to see the actual more or less final shape of the house. It seems very tall and long; but the builders said it will seem smaller when it is finished. I think it is an elegant asset to the glen: not outrageously imposing; respecting traditional shapes; sitting well in the landscape.

The road was wet and churned up but the builders have not had any difficulty getting up and down it. We have taken several pictures of it for Janet to remark the drainage and so forth.

See the captions to the pictures for my other comments.

More photos (those taken by Livy) below:

Livy's photos from 5 December

We have - planning permission

The title says it all. We don't have the piece of paper yet, but Mary has been told it is in the pipeline.

Heating; Kitchens; Gas; Water; Planning Issues; and a Roof

Roy is grappling with the question of how to control the heat pump system. This involves talking to about four different people: Mary, two separate heat pump specialists, and Alistair Fraser (about which more very soon). It seems a good idea to be able to turn off the floor heating in places where it is not always necessary: for example, in the sitting room when the stove is on and in the study when it is being a bedroom. It is fairly important to do this as a heat recovery system is essentially just another way of heating your house with electricity - not the cheapest of fuels; though, if properly generated, one of the least damaging to the planet. But control involves taps or switches - those things that tend to go wrong on radiators every autumn. Anyway, he is dealing with it.

The real news is that, in the course of conversation with Alistair, he discovered that we very nearly have a roof. What a surprise. Although I have been intellectually aware that things must be moving on in their own mysterious way, it is hard to believe, when the only pictures to keep looking at are the ones we took nearly a month ago.

I have been using a couple of days away from court to think more about kitchen furniture. I rather dislike Units and things made of chipboard; and we felt that the estimate provided by Mary's kitchen designers was perhaps a little pricey for what is, really, a pis aller; but it is quite hard to come up with an alternative that will look right in this very simple and undecorated house. So I have a fairly nice plan from Jonathan Avery, a very expensive one from Plain English, some ideas related to Magnet kitchens, and a fallback involving Ikea. Today I am going to speak again to Real Wood Kitchens. I feel I ought to be able to find a wonderful local joiner, but so far that hasn't happened.

As for other matters: I have started to wonder if Alistair has remembered to make a channel for the gas pipe; so after waking up in the middle of the night a couple of times I have rather shamefacedly asked Mary's assistant Robert to put my mind at rest. Now I have started wondering about the air vent for the stove; but I haven't had the nerve to tell him about that yet.

And finally, I am still trying not to think about the planning issue. As reported (I think), we are having to get the planning application amended to deal with the change of location. Or at least that is what we originally thought we would have to do. But it turns out that we needed a whole new application. So we are doing that terrible thing: building without planning permission. Diana sucked her teeth and sounded tremendously doubtful when I told her. Mary says it should be all right, even if it means going to appeal. We will know sometime in the New Year. Taking the long view, perhaps it is just another of those things that take a couple of years off one's life and give one something to tell people about afterwards. A little positive thought from everyone might help, though.

Oh - and the water men have not come yet. I am a bit loath to predict evil, but this may be the next thing to worry about.

Torygraph feature on The Shed

Mary's shed in the Torygraph

Photos from today's trip

Foundations finished

and

Road

and

Drainage & Sewage

and

From the "real" road

(read below for story from C)

Siwan and the Nymphs; or: We have a sewage treatment plant

We went to the Wood today; and Livy took lots of photographs which will be here soon. The moraine forming the road has solidified beautifully and seems to be taking construction plant with little difficulty. It was also resisting a very determined and heavy West Highland downpour.

The house site has also hardened, and the foundations have been filled in with concrete. There are drain holes; there are electricity cables, which seem to have been laid underground to the foot of the nearest electricity post; there is a sewage treatment tank with a natty domed green lid right in the foreground of the view from the side window in the sitting room; there is a track of extremely deep mud leading away from the sewage tank to the west burn, where the clean water discharge pipe comes out; there is a lot more peaty mud heaped in terraces behind the house; there is what may be the track of a buried telephone cable; there is a sort of grotto to the east of the house which is where we understand the water drilling may be taking place in due course, in which case it is most definitely the nymphaeum.

The house looks both rather big and quite small, depending on where one is looking at it from. We haven't walked into it, of course. It sits very neatly into the land, and the steps down to the sitting room seem to make sense. The views will be pretty good - better than from the earlier site.

I am now beginning to plan how to turn the acres of waterlogged peat heaps into a landscape again. At present, great areas of it simply cannot be walked on because one just sinks into it, when there is no mat of vegetation to hold one up.

Mirror version of plan

I've mirror imaged this in a graphics package and even turned round the important text, so you can get a better impression of the new orientation.

The photo of the sitting room was taken from about point B (at the top of the plan) towards SW.
The photo of the front door is taken from the inside of the Utility Room I think.

Foundations

Foundations

We have foundations (pictures by Mary). And we also have our first bill: for the road and the foundations and something under the landscaping and services heading. It is a bit too soon to start agitating for the revised planning permission, though we are of course subtly concerned about that. We trust it will not be a problem; and what else can one do?

Windows

The windows are being ordered today. Suddenly, there are urgent decisions to make about what sort of opening and what sort of beading we want. There is a 10 week ordering delay. This tends to suggest that we may have a building with windows by Christmas. Good lord. This might really be happening, somewhere far away from the first week of term and prosecuting crime.

Construction begins

October 1 2007

Old Downstairs plan

Use a mirror to view the New orientation.


NB (C) etc. Dualchas.

Flipping the house; laying out the foundations

We have decided to flip the layout of the house around a north-south axis. The new site's views will be better that way. Mary says this is not hard to do. In due course, we will try to put copies of the plans somewhere here.

Mary is going to the site with the builder next Wednesday to mark out the foundations. How we hope they do not sink to their boots.

We are still clearing up a number of points of detail; but we hope that none of them will involve extra cost. Unfortunately, we are having to cancel the sheep's wool insulation.

Making Roads is an Art

We went to look at the site on the way to Somewhere Else. Mary had told me the road looked good but that the site looked a little wetter than she would like. There were three huge yellow machines at the entrance, and a piece of red and white tape and a sign about men working. The new road is pale and interesting and goes down in beautiful curves, a slightly different route from the other new road that ended up in the peat. On the way, it passes a huge quarry which is where the road material - moraine - comes from. We have lost a couple more trees but Tristan's camp site is still there. Only - if you take the old road from the original gate you run the risk of breaking your leg falling into the quarry.

The road is on a sort of causeway and there is a culvert for the small stream, which was gushing amazingly as the weather had been spectacularly wet. On to the new house site, where the knoll was and now emphatically is not. We disappeared calf-deep in the wettest bits of the site and understood Mary's remark.

There is a nice view from the new site which is more elevated. It snuggles quite nicely into the hillside, though there is a step of a couple of feet at the south side. There is a bank at the back just high enough for green-roofed wood- and bike-sheds.

On the way back to the car we saw that a minibus had stopped: Alex Sutherland, who explained that we had passed him coming along the road and he had driven back to Invergarry, changed vehicles and come back to chat. He is a very nice and skilful man and I hope the fact that we made it clear that we admire his road does not mean that he will inflate its cost.

He says that the moraine will be a good hard surface when it dries out. He also said that he had made the house platform a little larger than expected because he had found a place where the drillers may well put their borehole. Something about the kind of rocks there.

We thanked him for the elegant curves. He said he finds straight lines boring. We thanked him for putting the top soil back so nicely. He was amazed that anyone would not do that.

We think the site will look very nice and natural when it has settled down a bit; and there is a rather decent terrace behind the house which might be a garden - a thing we had not planned. And the former new road, which has been filled in again, might do rather well as the beginnings of a rhododendron wood.

The New Road

New Road

Cecilia can do a post with more descriptions etc. of what's going on.

The horrors of PEAT

So long ago that we can hardly remember it, at the first site visit with Mary, in fact, when we decided on the site, she said, "But if there is peat under there the engineer won't let us build on it." The digger finally went on site last Monday, or perhaps Tuesday, after the spare part from Japan, the lack of which prevented the start on 13 August, had arrived. When we went past on Wednesday, returning from a few days at the Other Place, we stopped off and admired the huge great drive that has now been carved out of the entrance spinney, carefully avoiding the oak, as instructed. There was no one working, though, at 10.30 ish; and there was a rather deep wallow full of water at the meadow end of the track, which ought to have warned us something was up.

Later, when we had turned a telephone on and got a signal, we received a carefully worded message from Mary to say that PEAT had been found and an urgent site meeting was required. And she duly arranged it forthwith; and we turned round just as we were about to get on to the A9, and went back.

Alistair Fraser, the builder, is jolly nice and so is Alex Sutherland the immensely experienced digger man. They both come surrounded by the praises of all the local people we have asked for advice; and they have the sort of self confidence that people get from knowing that they do a thing well. When I arrived (Roy went back to Tomdoun for Mary) they were standing beside a new hole, about 3 metres deep, looking sorrowful. It was beautiful shiny smooth dark brown peat right down to the bottom, and further, for all we knew to the contrary, and ominous little plopping noises from the bottom were not rats but moist morsels dropping off as the water began to run in. It looked rather delicious, like some of the earth in Narnia that the trees ate in The Magician's Nephew. "The whole site wobbles when the digger drives over it." As we saw later. So that was a no-go. An off the top of the head calculation later indicated that the cost of infill alone, were we to try to build on the original site, would amount to £60,000, if it could not be found somewhere on site and had to be bought in.

So we wandered off in the wake of the digger and chewed up a bit of the bog across the little stream. Better, but not good; fill that hole. Up to a pretty little knoll, formerly designated as part of The View From The Sitting Room, where A and A had chewed things up a bit some years ago when wondering whether to buy the site. (Presumably at around the time we actually did buy it.) The digger munched a bit more, found stones, real earth, no rock (which is, rather anti-Biblically, a bad thing, apparently): good stuff. The digger wandered off on its own a bit and found that the underlay of the little knoll is good moraine. So we all admired that hole before it got filled in again.

And lo, it was decided, no fuss, to move the house to the knoll. Mary paced it out, had a short fierce battle on our behalf about keeping the damage to the environment and the destruction of trees to a minimum (it was nice to witness that); various discussions took place about the orientation, the space that will be required for the statutory West Highland straggle of ratty little outhouses; we asked for a costing of the extra expense of another 100 yards or so of access track; Mary said she would clear it all with the planners; and that was that.

We are a little worried at Alex's propensity to see a hillock with trees on it and identify it as a good source of road-making material; and it seems that rather more of the entrance spinney will be devoured in this way than we would like. But what do you do when someone is obviously an expert? We will need gravel. And I THINK it was only a tease when he said that a couple of branches really ought to come off the oak. Mary knows that she is going to have an ongoing battle to make sure that the building site and the access drive are both set into the land rather than being built up. Rather her than us; that is what we pay her for.

All this is Roy's fault. He has been worrying that the bedrock will be too near the surface to bury the sewage treatment plant properly.

Moral: when building in the Highlands, it is as well to have a really large site. Or, alternatively, dig trial pits right at the beginning.

New Site

The trees in the distance will be roughly where the house will now be sited.



More photos from when R&C visited the site on Wednesday.

Digger Works

Aerial Photo

Yellow - road (not brick, just small), white = house (wrong angle - will be angled a bit more to face SW I think), river at the bottom.
Link to original on www.multimap.com

Nearly started

OK Since no one else is posting on here, I will.

Work was due to start on 13 August, but the digger was broken (off to Fort William for TLC). Roy went to meet the builder and digger-driver on site and plodded around in the rain discussing where the access road will go.

Wed 22nd - Contract signed! (yes a bit topsy turvy but it's OK - the work on site still hasn't started).

And the builder has asked Mary to ask Dr D not to contact him directly... oh dear, my parents are the Clients from Hell already and no turf has been turned!

May 7th

May 7th

>As we drove out from our weekend at the even-more-remote place, we stopped off at the Wood to plod around and take some photos. Click the link above for some of them.

The latest from the Architect is that the chosen builder could start to do siteworks in July, and be ready to start actually building in September, with a proposed 7-month build from then. Could be ready in time for Midges 2008!

Our architect's house

The Shed

On Saturday we had an appointment on Skye with Mary the architect to discuss the plans and also to see around her house (recently completed). I took some photos of her house (with her permission of course) and have uploaded them for your pleasure.

Brrr

One that Roy took in March.

Timeline Continued

August 2006 - Planning Permission granted
March 2007 - Plans submitted for building warrant
April 2007 - Tenders in from builders
Pictures at about this time last year. Perhaps it's greener this year (spring seems earlier than last year).
We'll be going past the site around the May bank holiday. More photos then!