Next for 2015

We will be back at the steading in mid-May. We have discovered cheap flights from Luton to Aberdeen – it is a 2.5 hour drive to Luton, so probably 5 hours door-to-door, less than half the time to drive. Flights are evenings so we can travel up in an afternoon and travel back after a days work. We can borrow a vehicle to get backwards and forwards to the steading. It does mean we will travel light. We cannot get my trusty toolbox on the plane, but we will post a box of essentials to Aberdeen before we travel. This includes our backpack sprayer, hammers, pliers, bolsters & cold chisels and the like.

We have a range of things to do:

1. If the knotweed is tall enough/has enough leaves, spray it with glyphosate.
2. Get a petrol strimmer and knock back all the other perennial weeds, mainly nettles ground-elder, thistles and docks.
3. Get our electrician, Luke, to install a couple of sockets in the meter box.
4. Cut up the concrete lintel that that is embedded in the corner of the East leg of the steading, this frees the way for George to remove the concrete wall and break the concrete in the courtyard. I estimate the beam weighs about a quarter of a tonne, so we should be able to put two bays of scaffolding underneath it, put a couple of jacks in between the planks and the beam, then cut the beam up into manageable chunks. I will leave the embedded bit in the steading wall until we are tidying up the stonework. I will need to borrow or hire a Stihl concrete saw.
5. Put some lengths of timber across the joists we exposed over Easter to brace them, so they will not collapse when we remove the other side of the roof.
6. Continue working on removing the roof. We will try and speed things up by sliding the slates down the roof, using a timber to stop them falling down to the ground.

Unroofing – the start

I had worried that removing the roof would seem like a huge step back, leaving us with just the rubble walls and a load of stuff to dispose of. On the other hand, I  expected the roof timbers and sarking board to supply us with firewood for a year or two.

When it came to it, it is stopping us working on the stonework, so it has to go. Before Easter we bought our scaffolding and, the day we got on site, set up two bays of it against the inside wall of the west leg i.e. against the gable-end that must be demolished and re-built.

We had discussed about saving the slates and re-using them. The architect was very discouraging, saying they would be poor quality and that we would probably only save a low proportion, possibly enough to re-roof the bothy.

I armed myself with a slaters rip, claw hammer and roof ladder, then got going.

Ridge Tiles: Firstly the clay ridge tiles. From the ground they looked pretty bad and I expected that hacking them out would probably destroy them. Not so, they were in excellent condition, the lime mortar had crumbled and they slid off with little effort on my part. They were all marked with ‘Hurlford by Kilmarnock’. This probably means they were made by J & R Howie of Hurlford, Kilmarnock. I have no idea how old they are, we supposed they must date from the fire that damaged the steading either before or after WWII (depending on whose version you believe). It looks as though the same tiles were used along the entire roofline. http://www.scottishbrickhistory.co.uk/j-r-howie-scotland-kilmarnock/

Clout nails:I discovered very early on that the slates were nailed with standard galvanised clout nails. It was obvious that the rip would not work as advertised – if I hit it hard enough to draw the nail it would a) destroy the rip and b) destroy the slate.

Removing the slates: The course of half-size slates at the top of the roof were single-nailed in the top-centre. Most pulled out easily, indeed several on the other side of the roof fell as I moved the roof ladder about. From then on, it became harder work.

Most of the full-size slates were nailed both sides, a few cm down from the top. The nails were generally knocked flush with the top surface of the slate, but were enough proud in many cases to use a pair of pliers to grab the head, right at the very end of the pliers, then twist and pull the nail to remove it. Those that this did not work with, I used the rip to push under the slate as near the nail as possible, then used the claw of the hammer under that to lever the slate up. In most cases the slate pushed the nail up enough to then pull it with the pliers, without cracking the slate. It looked as though about 4 out of 5 slates survived my treatment AND were in good enough condition to re-use.

The half-length slates at the bottom of the roof were, on the whole, pretty rubbish and just used to cover the edges of the slates above.

We used our chain hoist to get crates of 15 or so slates down at a time, Jill sorted and stacked them.

The slates: The slates were generally smooth underneath, pretty flat and with no signs of imperfections such as pyrite (which oxidises, expands and breaks up the slate). They had a reasonably good ‘ring’ to them and were rather rustic. Comparing them to the ones off the old East Byreleask farmhouse (dumped out of the way on Aitken’s land) they are 1) larger, 2) thicker, with quite a bit of variation and 3) with a coarser upper surface finish. I actually prefer our slates. We left three slates, in varying degrees of preservation, with Jill’s parents. They should have a slater around to work on their roof and they will ask him whether they are fit to use again. I think the slates at the top of the roof were, on average, thinner than the ones at the gutter.

[Updated 17/04/2015: The slater said they were good quality Welsh slate and were good to re-use. If we wanted, say, Spanish slate, he would buy the old slates and we would probably profit from it. This brings to mind what may be an Urban (Rural) Myth that I heard twice in quick succession – that a slater would persuade the owner of a roof to remove them, saying they were not fit to re-use. They would offer to dispose of the old slate, which they indeed sold on, making a double profit over just fitting new slates.]

It is slow!: It is unbelievably slow – after four part-days we had cleared some 4% or the total roof area. I got a bit quicker, but not much.

The Skylights: There are a couple of dozen of these monsters dotted around the roof. They are made of cast iron, with the opening part hinged at the top and with a glazing bar down the middle. They are chunky, with little room for glass. They came away much more easily that I had feared. I used a prybar to lever the nails out – one each side halfway up and two at the top, just about on the corners. There was a strip of galvanised mild steel under the lower edge, but no additional strengthening in the timberwork. Each one weighed a good 30 kg.

The Roof Timbers: It was obvious the sarking board was in a bad state. They were worm-eaten and often the nails would pull out easily. Once I had cleared the slates above the scaffolding, I removed the boards and was horrified at what had been holding me up (on the roofing ladder). Most broke apart in clouds of dust, only a small number of boards still had any flex in them. It was a quick job to remove them, but they are not really usable as firewood – we will have a bonfire at some point.

By removing the boarding, I came to realise that there was no beam along the top of the roof – once the boarding on the other side of the roof is removed, there is nothing to stop each pair of rafters simply falling sideways – I will take advice on this.

Meanwhile we need to think out how to speed up the un-roofing – we are even thinking about unpaid leave from work.

Concrete, Steel, Glass & Brick

And a whole load of stuff that we really want out of our way…

Concrete & Steel: Over Christmas we agreed with George that he would break concrete for us. I emailed a plan for the first bits and by the time we visited at Easter, he had got a large chunk of it done. He charged us for 1.5 days + £50 for the breaking tip he hired – but had run out of time to finish the job. In fact whilst we were there, he was too busy to come and collect his money, so I gave to his dad for safekeeping. He had cleared enough to let us get our water supply installed.

We found out why the big silage clamp wall would not just push over, when he tried at Christmas – it had half a dozen I-beams up the height of the wall at regular intervals, buried in the ground. Looking at the shorter stretch of wall, I spotted two more. George had uprooted one, it had a massive cube of concrete at the base. When he gets time, he will carry on and will uproot the remaining beams.

Glass: We noticed at Christmas that there was broken glass all over the site, particularly in courtyard. This time, Jill collected bags of broken bottles from the ground behind the bothy. There were quite large numbers of shotgun cartridges as well, we wondered whether it was a sport for a former tenant to drink beer and shoot the bottles. We turned our first compost heap and kept finding bits of window glass that we had missed when we cleared the courtyard the previous summer.

Brick: Jill found a large cache of red bricks, right in the centre of our Knotweed patch. One had a makers name on it and we reckon they are local, either Cruden Bay or Ellon – a bit of a surprise to us that bricks were even made in Aberdeenshire. They are about double the size of standard bricks. We have the choice to crush them, or to re-use them as a path or wall. They might be quite old, so they may become our pathway in our polytunnel, when we finally get one.

Water? Ah yes, the water!

Many moons ago, I emailed Aberdeenshire council about how to get permission to work on the roadside, to prepare for connecting our water supply. They never got back. I kept chasing until early December, just when I was getting ready to lodge a complaint. Instead, someone in the council put two and two together and gave me contact details for the person I needed to speak to. That person was unapologetic and asked for my HAUC ticket number.

So it turns out that you need to be in the ‘approved contractor’ club to work on public roads. He gave me a shortlist of local contractors.

I mentioned it to George, he suggested Cadgers, who are also in Clola and who had sorted our neighbour Mr Aitken’s water supply at the roadside, immediately next to our pipe (and buried at the same time by the Slains Estate).

I phoned Cadgers after New Year. Firstly I had to give the person at the other end a landline number (because so many people do not answer mobile calls), then say how I had found out about them. I dropped George’s name, she knew who he was and I was in.

Meanwhile my application for connection was grinding through Scottish Water, I phoned them at the end of January to be told they had sent a quote out by post. They emailed it to me: ‘Application’ £83.70, ‘Connection’ £266.60, ‘Infrastructure’ £333.90 and ‘Building Water’ £190.00. The total is £874.20, rather less than I had been expecting. I accepted the quote and awaited an invoice, which arrived whilst we were away for three weeks. We paid electronically on 12th March and got a red reminder the following day by post. That was 3 days short of 5 months from start to finish.

Anyway, I let Cadger know that we were waiting on them, he came out to the steading over Easter, had a look and suggested around £1,800 for both ends of the pipe. He reckoned the water pipe is 32mm and he would reduce it down to 25mm. He would apply for the permit and talk to the Scottish Water contractors (probably Seivwright, one of the companies recommended by Aberdeenshire council). We said we would want the water by June.

Scaffolding

We calculated that hiring scaffolding for the period we needed would be more expensive that buying it. We started looking shortly before Easter and homed in on one of the Ebay sellers. It does look as though many of them are the same person, trading under different names.

I looked for Kwikstage rather than CupLock/ScafLock, because it is quite a lot cheaper (it is painted, not galvanised) and is more available second hand. I believe it is particularly popular with self-builders.

Anyway, we found a package which was a 5-bay run (40′, 12m), of two courses (mostly 9′ 9″, 3m and some 6′ 6″, 2m) for £1,400 inc VAT, which seemed reasonable value. This will cover a full run along the outside edges of the east and west legs of the steading, and about halfway along the north leg. It will just about cover the height of the gable ends.

I found a handy KwikStage guide online and put it on my phone. It was quick and easy from then on. We asked about carriage to Aberdeenshire, the price went up to £1,550 – seemed reasonable and much cheaper than I could have done it hiring a truck. We paid electronically, arranged with the trucking company for an hours notice of delivery, on the Good Friday. We got our notice, drove out, met the truck, guided it down our track and less than an hour later, the truck was on its way. The driver was a fairly young lad and grumbled because we did not have a fork lift. He passed stuff down to the two of us, we piled it neatly on the ground. We had a few moments of comedy when the driver started passing down the scaffolding boards. He got down to a set of them which must have been pressure treated really recently, they were very wet and weighed a ton. He grabbed two of them. got ready to swing them around and nothing happened. He went back to passing them down one at a time.

We had dumped it all on Mr Aitken’s drive, so spent the next hour moving it into our bothy, apart from a two-bay run that we put in the steading under cover. It was in good condition and had been refurbished including re-spraying, with new boards. We had a new set of screw jacks to stand the scaffold on and to level it up. We opened up the KwikStage guide and had a short introduction to scaffolding language as we grappled with Standards, Transoms and Ledgers.

We put the two bays up on the inside wall of the west leg. After a shaky first few minutes, then a short period when I was hammering the metal wedges in so hard that I later had trouble getting them back up, it was all quite straightforward. We levelled it up with the screw jacks and boarded out just below gutter height, so that we would have easy access to the roof. I put two levels of guard rail in – I do not have a head for heights and wanted to feel safe. It was reasonably stable, particularly after we slotted in one of the diagonal braces. I used a ratchet strap, round a fence post placed across the inside of a doorway, to tie the scaffolding in.

I had room to put an extra ledger at about head height, to attach our chain hoist to.

 After 5 days of use, removing slates, I concluded:

• There is room for 5 boards in the 4′ width of the platform, but they do not quite fill the gap. Either you have a gap at the outside edge and worry that the boards will slide back under stress, or live with a gap on the inside edge which means that anything narrow sliding down the roof vanished out of sight – slates and tools.
• I might want to get toe boards, just in case I ever slid down the roof with enough speed to slide over the far edge of the scaffolding.
• I want to get ‘proper’ bits to tie the scaffold in to whatever wall it is against. A select number of CupLock items might be in order.
• Otherwise it is exactly what we need, is quick and easy to set up/dismantle. It feels safe.

Demolition Warrant

We had tasked our architect with getting us a demolition warrant, so that we could remove the roof and demolish the fire-damaged gable-end over the spring and summer. Despite this, I was somewhat surprised to get an email, at the end of February, with the requisite warrant and the invoice. A paper copy duly arrived. We are allowed three months to complete the demolition, although the architect suggested that, with such a remote site, it was unlikely anyone would be looking.

This rather insignificant piece of paper cost us: £285 to the architect; £100 to Aberdeenshire council and £12.40 for document and postage. With VAT this was £476.88.