And so it goes

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Spent last fortnight continuing with plasterboard and fixing door surrounds etc. Despite one or two hiccoughs (incl temporary loss of table saw which we managed to repair) )work progresses.

Lots of COLD clear days and picture card views (especially first thing in the morning when the sunlight first hits the peaks and turns thenm orange then pink. Also the sky at night with its infinity of stars. Socially quite quiet though an old friend John Hobson and partner Irene dropped in as did one of last years Czech volunteers (Jan).

Good news on Friday stove should be delivered next week so once plaster is complete and flooring down we can get Ronnie, the plumber, back to install heat and water (including bath!). So hopefully I should be able to move into house, in some form, by end of March and maybe be pretty well finished by our planned house warming date of 9th May!

Sounds good to me... I get to see it next week for the first time since mid-January. Next week all the downstairs walls and ceilings are being plastered, so downstairs will look almost finished. Meanwhile the view from the number 38 bus improves: by next week we should see sunrises over Edinburgh, which is very pretty

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Photos

Thermafleece
main purpose is sound insulation rather than heat

Insulation
Just a fraction of the insulation which has gone or will go into house - thermafleece, sheepswool and some odd bits of Kingspan (floor insulation)

Kitchen with new ceiling
For the last several weeks the kitchen has been a storeroom for plasterboard it was good to see the space cleared giving you, or at least me, some idea of what it might look like

View from living room
Real reason for photo was to show Wendy new plasterboard above window

Rubbish
Despite our best efforts at doing an eco friendly build the amount of rubbush we're generating is frightening things light polythene wrapping, scraps of insulation and plastic and of course scrap plasterboard, sawdust etc

Sunrise on Ptarmachan Ridge
Seen from what will be our bedroom balcony (currently scaffolding). The sunrises have been awesome as have been some of the clear, albeit freezing, nights when you can make out the Milky Way and stars beyond counting

Ice crystals through a window
You can just make out the sun's rays hitting the hills across the loch.

Trying out the floor tiles for inside the front door
Using tiles in this area to capture heat from the sun (thermal mass)

Our bedroom
we're going to put a window in the space between the beams but in order top avoid using safety glass need it to be at least 800mm above floor level

Bathroom
The bathroom upstairs has always seemed a long thin room, with not much space. That seems to have been an optical illusion - it seems quite broad and evem has access into the storage space at the eaves

little walls
These are the little walls on the north side of the house. Maria and David and Anna helped us to wrap the beams with celophane to keep them clean when the walls were sprayed with lime plaster. They must have done a good job, because these beams did stay very clean, unlike some of the others which got splashed with a lot of lime, which is very hard to remove