A flying visit

We were back in Aberdeen over the second weekend in June, but only for a few days. Mairi, one of our daughters, was back from several months in South Africa, was at a conference in Glasgow on the Friday, and took the opportunity to go across to Aberdeen to meet family and to celebrate her birthday.

On the Friday evening travel up we avoided most of the travel pitfalls from May: We went straight to Luton without unnecessary detours; we had a full tank of diesel; we parked at the airport mid-term parking which is only minutes from the terminal. So we got there with 2 hours to spare, to find that the flight was delayed from 7pm to around 9.30pm. We did get £3 each from the airline for refreshments, but this did mean queuing to get the token, then get food. It turned out not quite as bad – we were on our way by 9pm and everything else went well – Bryan met us in Aberdeen and whisked us back to Bucksburn. Jill’s parents happen to be in Aberystwyth, but we have leave to stay in their house and use Lesley’s car.

The forecast for Saturday (steading day) was grim – chilly and wet – and good for Sunday (Birthday day). Jill and Mairi did a rather miserable Parkrun at Hazelhead park on the Saturday morning, where it was indeed cold and did drizzle. In reality though the weather cheered up, with only one or two light showers through the rest of the day.

The three of us headed out at about 11am. We put scaffolding boards back on the three bays that we left against the east leg of the steading. I started removing the sarking, whilst Mairi used the strimmer and Jill collected the wood and started a bonfire. As predicted, the boarding was generally better preserved than the rest of the roof and by lunch time I really thought we would not get done in the day. We cracked on though and cleared & burnt it, then dismantled the scaffolding and put it back in the bothy. Quite a bit of graft for a few hours productive work, but it had to be done.

We have the Power!

Our electrician, Luke, agreed to install some temporary sockets, during our May visit. He had suggested at some point that he could put them in the outside meter cupboard.

In reality he did more than that. He provided us an earth spike, at the north west corner of the steading, close to the old one. He wired the earthing into the meter box, temporarily running it up the steading wall, over the existing large entrance in the west wall and down to the cupboard. He drilled through the wall, put a weatherproof metal cabinet on the inside wall and ran tails through to it. He put a 100A main switch, and wired in a 30A mini ring with MCB, with two double sockets.

We borrowed an old kettle from the In-Laws, bought a 45m 13A extension lead and tested it all out with a good old fashioned cup of tea. The meter reading is exactly what it was when we first bought the property, I do not feel inclined to let SSE know we finally have a supply, until we use a more serious amount of electricity.

As I believe electricians do, he charged us for the goods and separately for his labour. When it comes to the main wiring, we will probably get three quotes for the full job so we get a better idea of what we would expect to pay, even if we go with Luke.

Un-roofing II

Getting more efficient: We used a 10-day slot to crack on with rescuing slates from the steading roof and removing the sarking boards. We had thought over how to speed it all up:

• Lay spare scaffold planks along the lower edge of the roof and let the slates slide down, rather than lowering them down 8 or so at a time
• Set up intermediate platforms in the scaffolding to lower slates onto, rather than using the chain hoist

In practice this made a huge difference – we cleared more in a full day that we had got done over three days over Easter. We followed the roof around the courtyard, finishing the east side of the west leg, working along the south side of the north leg, then the west side of the east leg. We had the benefit of pressed labour i.e. family. Our son Alec was there most of the time. Our friend Lynn came over for most of a day. So we had usually had someone on the roof, someone collecting the slates and passing them down and a third person sorting and stacking them. My youngest brother, Geoff, came up to the area for a long weekend and lent his professional expertise for a good half-day. For a while we were struggling to keep the scaffolding ahead of him. We had all five bays out along the north leg.

We just got the three spans of roof facing the courtyard cleared of slates before we had to head back down south, but did not get the sarking off the east leg – almost halfway through, but not quite.

Why the roof has to be removed: Many people have wondered why we need to take the entire roof off. The answer starts to become clear once the slates are removed – the sarking boards underneath are in a very variable state, some are in reasonable condition but most are badly worm-eaten. Some are so bad that they crumble. Parts of the east & west legs had a thin and fragile membrane between slates and board and although even this was worm-eaten, it had helped preserve the boarding.

As the boarding was removed, it also became clear that, whilst most of the rafters are in quite good condition, they are in a poor state anywhere water has been able to get under the slates. This is the case around most of the roof lights and, on the north leg, where the roof had been butchered to put block & brick supports for the now-removed roof over the courtyard. In a number of places the wall plate had rotted out and it was obvious that the rafter was being held in place, with an air-gap at the bottom, by the rest of the roof.

I have some concerns about removing the other side of the roof – in some places it is not clear what will be holding me up.

Concrete Playtime

Our courtyard still has a flimsy-looking concrete-block wall across much of the southern edge. This is one of only a few reminders that the courtyard was, until the site was prepared for sale, mostly roofed over. Given the block wall and the prolific remains of corrugated asbestos roof panels when we first cleared the courtyard, I expect it had been a post-WW II thing.

George is to demolish the wall when he gets to it, but we had a problem to fix first – a 3.3m long concrete lintel perched precariously on one end of the wall but with the other end firmly bedded into the gable-end wall of the East leg of the steading. I expect that were the lintel to fall down, it would cause quite a bit of collateral damage.

I consulted, the consensus was to use a concrete saw to cut it up. A quick calculation suggested it weighed around a half-tonne – 30cm wide, 25cm thick, 3.3m long and assuming a density of 2.3 tonnes per cubic metre.

I used a bay of our scaffolding to build a platform less that 20cm below the base of the lintel. I estimated that, with one end supported on the wall, sawing through the lintel as close to the other (steading) end as possible, should put no more than 250kg loading on the platform. I laid a scaffolding board at an angle under the lintel, to spread the load across the platform, then filled most of the remaining space with bricks – leaving about a 2cm gap.

I hired a (brand-new) Makita saw from Ellon Timber with a new diamond blade, practiced my moves on a ridge of concrete that had been laid on top of the lintel (doubtless to seal up to the roof), then went for it. The saw had a cutting depth of around a third of the thickness of the lintel. I put three parallel cuts 10cm apart, as close to the steading end as possible. I used a club hammer and bolster to break the concrete out to most of the depth of the cuts. This gave me room to put two parallel cuts into the gap, which I again cleared out. Then a single cut through the bottom of the lintel. There were rebars on each corner of the lintel and a chunky square bar down the centre. The saw made easy work of the concrete and produced impressive showers of sparks from the bars. On cutting the last bar, the lintel settled quietly onto the scaffolding. The concrete was in good condition, but seemed to be a sand-cement mix with a few random boulders thrown in – an unusual formulation, according to the family guru on concrete.

I did the same again twice more along the length, rolling the cut segments over the edge of the platform. I will leave them for George to move, meanwhile we have some handy benches for lunch breaks. The end embedded in the steading wall can stay there until we need to tidy up the stonework, by that point we will have a fairly chunky concrete breaker at our disposal.

I was quite relieved it was out of the way and that I was still alive and undamaged. All for the princely sum of a bit over £19 – for saw, blade and fuel.

Japanese Knotweed – Decline, but not Fall

I know it is early days, but our Japanese Knotweed infestation looks to be a shadow of its former self.

The copious amounts of brushwood-strength glyphosate we sprayed last September look to have hit it hard. This despite not being able to attack much of the middle of the area because it was above our heads. We now have a large circle of absolutely bare ground – no perennial or annual weeds – with a moderate scattering of rather sickly looking new growth. I think the glyphosate must indeed have worked its way well through the rhizome system, even into the area I cut back.

It is early in the season, and towards the middle of the patch it is already a metre high, but it is nowhere near as scary as we were expecting. We will spray again in September, but meantime we broke the new growth off at ground level, being careful not to leave the broken ends in contact with the ground – we will see if this weakens it, but still allows enough new growth to treat in the Autumn.

It does make me wonder if the plant may have been bigged-up by the Knotweed-killing industry, for their own purposes – heaven forbid.