A flying visit

We had planned a while ago to fly up to the steading over the late-May bank holiday. We wanted to meet up with our granite lintels and sills, however this was not to be. They were delayed and Ric headed south early because there was not a huge amount to do. We went ahead with our visit because we had bought the tickets and car parking, got the dog booked into kennels etc. It was a sound decision – we had four days of wall-to-wall sunshine, low winds and moderate temperatures – warmer and sunnier than down south.

We had a bit of a mare getting home, though – we got back 13 hours later than scheduled. We got to the airport just after 7pm for an 8.35 flight. At 8pm we were told it would be delayed until 10.20pm, then 11.20pm. Then, after 11pm, someone spotted that flightradar was showing the incoming flight, having circled over the airport for a while, heading back over Dundee. We knew it had landed in Glasgow before it was officially announced that a) it was going to refuel and then b) that it was too foggy to land in Aberdeen, so our flight was cancelled. We were near the front of the queue at the Menzies Aviation desk where one hapless individual had to sort out over 100 concerned passenger, so we had only an hour to wait to get sorted out. We had little choice – wait two days for the evening flight out from Aberdeen or transfer to Glasgow for the 7am flight to Luton. So we taxied across to Glasgow, arriving 5am, got our flight out, got a train from Luton to Gatwick, transferred from the south terminal to north then got a bus back to the long stay car park. We knew which zone we had parked in, but it took about 40 minutes to find the car, we had not noted down the row number. Anyway it was a fairly quick run home, getting back about 2.30pm.

Back to the steading: We decided at the get-go on two areas of work – tidying our hedging and carrying on with concrete blockwork.

Weeding & tidying

With spring well underway, our hedging needed weeding and tidying up. In fact we could usefully have run the strimmer over most of the garden, but I had taken it south last year so we could keep our allotment in order. I will take it back up in July.

Jill worked her way round the entire plot, pulling weeds, removing tree guards, removing dead stuff and replacing the guards. The failure rate is still reasonably low, even in the areas that flooded over the winter, probably less than 1 in 10 overall. Most plants have broken well clear of the tree tubes and are starting to bush out, but for whatever reason, we have patches where they are languishing – it may be the wrong species in the wrong place or just poor ground. We had problems over the winter with the wind blowing some of our tree netting over and the rabbits had chewed the bark off a couple of our fruit trees. We will look to do a proper inventory later in the year and buy a small batch of replacements. We will probably not do anything where one plant has failed, we will expect the others around it to fill up the gap.

Concrete Blockwork

Ric had left the mobile bay of scaffolding in the master bedroom area of the west wing, for us. I carried on from where Ric had left off – he had constructed the north gable-end as high as the sill for the upstairs window, then worked around the west wall getting blockwork up to old wallhead height. I blocked out a shortish length of original wall to new wallhead height (four courses of blockwork, 2 across the width of the wall, 2 along). I then worked on the south gable-end. This had been taken partly up to ground-floor lintel height last September. I built it up level to old wallhead height, going round each corner and tying it in to the original walls. I then extended just the gable-end upwards to the same height as Ric has with the north gable-end i.e. to sill level for the upper story window. We ran out of time & mortar to do more, with just two blocks not mortared into place. Looking at the gable-end that we have part-raised to new roof height, we will need a few more blocks to tie the gable-end in to the raised blockwork on either side wall – at worst we might need to use wall-ties.

We can carry on with the concrete blocks, getting the west wing gable-ends completed, raising the last piece of old wall to new wallhead height and blocking over the new piece of wall we finished in the east wing. Beyond that we need to get building the granite skin in front of the blockwork in the remainder of the east wing. And that needs us to have the lintels and sills.

Looking at my spreadsheet, we have bought 34 pallets of blocks to date: 2912 concrete blocks, with around 450 not yet used. Six pallets-worth of 10N ones went underground to get our foundations up to DPC. The rest have been 7N and above ground level. With the tops of two gable-ends to complete and nearly  half the wallheads still to raise, we might only need an additional 600 blocks – another 7 pallets! I doubt we will be sorry to see the end of them. In theory every single one of them will disappear from view.

Lintels & Sills delayed…

Our granite lintels & sills, ordered several moons ago, should have arrived this week. Last Friday we found out they would be a week late, with no-one at the steading to take possession of them. The slow boat from Portugal must be held up.
Anyway, I phoned Lantoom Quarry and they will reschedule delivery to the first week of July, when I will be up for a week. Ric will pop up for a week or two around the same time.
Having sills and lintels (and loads of quoin stones) means we can build up our windows, which means we can rebuild our walls, which means we can get the roof on the east wing – hopefully before the winter.

Garage progress

We need to do a lot of work to get our garage area, in the west wing, sorted. We took the entire north gable-end down, we need re-construct it to include the garage door. This requires installing two Catnic structural beams and a 2.7m x 300mm x 150mm granite lintel. We also need to block up the large opening in the side wall and reconstruct the window, where we had to extract a wooden internal lintel and replace it with concrete ones. The existing granite in that wall is sound but not brilliant. As an aside, we will probably get our incoming electricity supply moved to an in-wall box set into the opening we are blocking up – the current box is surface mounted and blew open over the winter, permanantly damaging the door.

On this visit all we really wanted to do was prepare for granite lintels arriving later in May. Ric & Geoff had already blocked out the back leaf of the gable-end wall, to lintel height. Before we arrived this time, Ric perched one of our two 3m Catnic metal beams across the garage door opening and continued the gable-end blockwork upwards to the sill height of the upper-floor window, finishing tying the blockwork into the remaining granite. He also built up the side opening towards old wallhead height and placed the concrete structural lintels over the side window opening behind the exterior granite lintel.

After we headed south, Ric intended to build up quoin stones either side of the garage wall, to a point where we will see if we can get the big granite lintel dropped directly into place when they are delivered – the current plan is that they will be delivered to the local builders merchant, in Ellon. They have fork-lifts and can deliver them to us. We expect this to be in the last week before Ric heads back to Cornwall. With the granite lintel in place, we will place the second Catnic directly above, with a gap of a couple of cm. We will start rebuilding the granite outer skin, including across the front-facing shelf of the Catnic. With a bit of care, we should be able to completely disguise the steelwork. Once everything has had a chance to settle, we can pack mortar in the gap between granite and steel lintels. That is the plan, it should ensure the granite lintel has zero loading on it, other than bearing its own weight…

First door and window reconstructed!

We bought lintels and sills on the assumption that there were none on site – we were not there at the time we ordered, and were not sure about the state of the few that were still in place.

It turned out:

• There are doors at opposite ends of the courtyard, one has a sound lintel in place, the other we had taken down and preserved. The latter has an adjacent small window, that had a rough sill (not projecting out at all) already in place and another suitable lintel in storage.
• The one remaining upper-storey window, in the north-east gable-end, has a sound lintel. We replaced the rotting timber internal lintel with concrete ones whilst we were tidying up that gable-end.
• We think there are two other lintels that we removed, that can be re-used.

We chose to use the courtyard door + window as the first openings to re-construct. One door pillar, immediately out from the corner where the north and east wings connect, had been demolished, for safety. The other door pillar is sound and forms one side of the window surround. The other side of the window and the sill were also sound. The backing blockwork was all in place, we painted on the three coats of bitumen-based DPC and let it dry out. Ric then built up the missing door pillar cutting quoins to fit into the existing stonework and tying it in with the strips of expanded stainless steel mesh previously set into the concrete blockwork. He stopped about halfway-up on the first day, to let the mortar go off a bit, and restarted next day.

We left it a couple of days further, then used the chain hoist to lift the window lintel up first, then the door lintel. There was a gap between the granite lintels and the two concrete structural lintels set into the concrete block work. We shuttered the gap underneath and poured in medium strength concrete.

And that was it, apart from completing the stonework above the lintels to the old wallhead height – we did that as a training exercise. Beyond that we can then block above that to new wallhead height, ready for the roof.

Gable-end facelift

The east wing of the steading has two gable-ends. The south end is complete & intact. The north end is sound, but in poor condition at the upper end. The retaining stones  that held the coping stones in place are long gone, as are the upper quoin stones. Some of the coping stones were missing, the remainder were threatening to slide off and we removed them a couple of years ago, for safety. This gable-end needs sorting out before we can get the roof on, plus we need to raise the roof by 45cm (four courses of 100mm concrete blocks + mortar lines) over the original wallhead height, so both gable-ends need to be raised as well.

The gable-ends are to be constructed (as they are now) in the traditional Scottish manner. The outer 300mm is a parapet that should be 150mm above the slating, with the coping stone above that. The remaining 200mm of wall is rough-finished, just under the sarking board and slates. The sarking projects out from the last truss, which will be tied in to the stonework of the gable-end. DPC runs under the coping, down the parapet and over the sarking, overlapping with the roof breather membrane. We flash lead over the exposed DPC, down onto the slating

Tidying up the north gable-end is a tricky proposition – we need to work out where the new roofline will be, given what we know about the proposed construction (raised-tie trusses) and a guess about the depth of the top chord above the wallplate (we assume 180mm at the 42-degree angle). We assume 22mm depth for sarking and 30mm for the slating. We calculated, quite accurately, from that where the retaining stones need to sit, so we can build the gable-end corners to the right height to support the retaining stones.

Enter stage right, a dummy roof truss that is exactly the right size to fit across the raised wallheads and exactly the right slope (42 degrees from horizontal). Ric created the truss and propped one side up in the correct position, using a length of wood. We cross-checked the dimensions and slope, realised it was 50mm too narrow, reconstructed it in-situ and screwed it onto the stonework to stop it blowing away. So now we could work out accurately where the retaining stones need to rest.

Enter stage left, the batch of granite we bought from our neighbour a couple of years ago. It is mostly quoin stones but, significantly, has two pairs of retaining stones. These are like over-size quoins, with a distinctive hollow cut into one end of the upper surface. The hollow allows the lowest coping stone to lodge in it and supports the next coping stone up the slope and so on. They are about the largest stones we will be handling apart from the lintel over the garage door.

With a level to work to, Ric rebuilt one side of the gable-end with quoin stones, let it go off for a couple of days, then we very gingerly hoisted the rather massive retaining stone into place. It was then a quick job to run blockwork up the inside of the wall, with just enough room for the finished roof to cross over to meet the parapet. Ric will repeat the operation on the other side of the gable end. We will leave completion of the parapet until we have the roof on, just in case we need to make fine adjustments.

Fireplace

Our building warrant allows us to install a wood-burning stove in the steading, halfway down the north wing. We have even laid in an air pipe, under the slab. The idea is to use it as a second source of heat for the under-floor heating (to supplement the heat pump) and hot water (to supplement the PV panels), as well as to heat the room it is installed in. Given the high levels of insulation in the building, we need much more heat going in to water than out into the room. We have abandoned the original idea of a double-facing stove to heat both the dining/living room and kitchen/family room – there is only one model that also heats water and it gets bad reviews. There is at least one model of well-rated single-faced stove that will put 12kW into heating water and around 3kW into the room – probably about right for us.

The plans show a rather modest stove surround and chimney breast.

Serendipitously, we are in a position to go for something much more impressive. We rescued a 2m lintel from over the large original opening in our garage area. We toyed with using it over our front door, however it is really too high and deep and is rather rustic, with two good faces and two rough faces. Ric suggested instead that we use it for our fireplace. The idea has taken hold. We spent several days umming and ahhing about designs and will probably do the following: 1) use the lintel over the fireplace, with the wide good face forming the front, 2) we have the option of using the good narrow face as a mantel shelf, in which case the stonework above would be stepped back appropriately – this is controversial so probably will not happen, 3) we will support the ends of the lintels on stone blocks selected from our quoin stones – either around 30cm wide or 35cm wide. The lintel is grey granite, most of the quoin stones are red. From this point on we have not worked out what we want. We will make the chimney breast some 900mm deep, between 1800 – 2000m wide. We will need to decide how high we want the lintel and how much stonework is exposed. Ric suggested exposed stone to the ceiling, we are not so keen: we found a steading on the ASPC website that had exactly this and it was too overpowering- our ceiling, for example, will be over 3.5m above floor level.

We will build the stonework directly on the floor slab, with concrete blocks to bring it up to final floor level. We probably need to start building it all before the roof goes on, because we will need scaffolding in the upper reaches. We moved it in through a door opening with the digger, onto wooden rollers on the concrete slab. We then rolled it more-or-less into position…

While we think this all over, I started to clean up what would be the lower surface of the lintel – it is quite uneven and rough. We used the angle grinder to cut notches every 10-15mm and used the medium breaker to chip the leftovers out. This has left a stripy surface. I tried a hand tool with a carbide tip and club hammer, to even out the surface, but it was hard work. I will buy some narrow chisels to see if we can level up the surface better than with the wide one. We also have a bush hammer on order, that may help finish the surface.

Rudiments of building with stone

Over the two weeks, Ric taught us the basics of building with stone. This is enough to get us going independently of him, although we would expect to ask for advice as we go, and to learn rapidly from our mistakes!

Splitting Granite. Ric had brought up his set of ‘feathers and tare’, enough to fill 8 holes. We experimented with drilling into granite using our new rotary hammer drill and the 18mm bits, up to 60-70mm apart. We inserted the metal work, with the outer wedges facing the direction we wanted to split. We then got used to hitting the wedges with a small club hammer, listening to the pitch of the sound they produced. We hit the lower-pitched wedges until they reached the higher pitches. As the granite started to give the pins would drop in tone, so we moved between them, keeping them all up as high as possible. After a short period (we were not splitting huge blocks of stone, plus we were working on field-stone which had weathered from new) the granite would give a distinctive ‘pfftt’ noise and give way, pretty much where we wanted it to. We started easy, splitting a rectangular quoin stone across the middle, then worked up to a much more irregular boulder where we needed to spall-off a chunk to make it usable. So far, so good! Of course, in the best of all possible worlds, all our stones would be just the right size and shape, so we would not need to split them up!

As another exercise, we shaped up the sill of one of our new openings. The base for this inconveniently ran through several large boulders. We drilled in and upwards (to get the downward slope for the sill) in the big boulders and used the feathers and tare to split them to height. We used the angle grinder to trim smaller stones to height – cutting parallel lines 10mm apart to the required depth, then using the medium breaker to chip out the remaining stone. Once we had the area cut to size, we laid a mortar bed over it and left it to go off.

Preparing lime mortar: We are using a simple 3:1 mortar mix for the bulk of the building work, where we will not see it. This is two measures of building sand with a small amount of plasticiser, a measure of lime then another measure of building sand, followed by mixing for 20 minutes. This is a little light on the lime, hence the plasticiser, but is quite strong enough. Incidentally, leaving it for longer that 20 minutes is not good, it seems to thin out the mix and is less workable. I actually preferred mixing for 15 minutes not 20, but 20 minutes is the norm.

Laying rubble walling: We picked a door opening that was becoming a window and which needed a single course of rubble, built up to sill height. We laid a bed of mortar on the foundation blockwork and got it to slope up towards the back. We laid the sheet of DPC built in to the backing stonework over the mortar bed. Where it was rather short, we cut an extension sheet that we laid directly on the mortar bed, projecting out, and laid the original over it. This way, any water that gets into the wall will be pushed out the front of the wall. For the first two sections we did, Ric selected the large stones that made up the bulk of the course. We placed these on fresh mortar over the DPC and used small pieces of stone under the edges, to wedge the boulders in place. This done, we put mortar between the gaps and progressively filled in with smaller boulders and, for the narrower gaps, pinning stones. When we came across a strip of the expanded steel mesh embedded in the concrete blockwork, we folded the end back so it would not show and built it in to the stonework, to tie it all together. We part-filled the gap between the inner leaf of concrete blocks and the stonework with mortar, padded out with as much waste concrete as we could. We wanted to avoid hydraulic pressure from the mortar and packing from pushing the stonework out at the base of the section of wall, so we finished filling the gap the following day. We levelled out the top of the course of stones and, prepared the top for sills. The third section, we did on our own – and learnt a lot from it. We ended up being too cautious about using large stones, so ended up with a style of walling that did not really match what was either side – building up the course with a large number of smaller boulders.

The following day, Ric left us to our own devices to complete the walling above a pair of granite lintels he had reinstalled over a doorway and window. This needed one shallow course to tie in to a level in the existing walling, then a full-height one (35cm) above that to get up to the original top of the wall. Being above lintels, I ran a sheet of DPC from the stonework over the lip of the lintels, on a bed of mortar. I had packed a row of small pieces of concrete waste against the concrete blockwork, to raise the mortar bed upwards to the back, to encourage any water in the wall to run down and out. I spent quite a while assembling the 8 large stones we needed, hoisted them on to the scaffolding along with buckets of smaller stones, broken concrete and small wedges to prop stones up. We are using flexible gorilla buckets for the lime mortar, I discovered that I could loop the handles into our hoist and get full buckets up more quickly and easily than lugging up by hand – provided the handles do not give way. Once everything was in place, it was comparatively quick to place the lower, shallow course, back fill the gap and lay the upper course of big stones directly above. Technically we should have waited a day for the shallow course to go off, but we were short of time and accepted the risk that the lower layer might collapse under the one above – it did not, to my relief. We did include three boulders that were slightly too big, the bits that are above the level of the backing concrete leaf will need to be trimmed off before we can lay the concrete blockwork on top, that will raise the roof to the new level.

Preparing for pointing: We roughly filled the stonework with mortar as we went, knowing that next day, we would scrape it back to prepare for final pointing. After a day the mortar was hard enough to stand working, but soft enough to easily scrape back – a bit like granulated sugar that has got damp then dried out. I used a small pointing trowel to scrape mortar away from the edges of stones and to level it back a cm or two to a flat finish. We then used a churn brush to batter the mortar surface to a slightly rough finish. This will allow the final mortar fill to more easily bind to it. This initial picking transforms what initially looked to be messy stonework into a much neater and better defined finish. It is also at this point that you can really see how well the stonework matches what is around it. You have to live with it the way it turns out, but you can learn from it!

The final pointing can wait, we would want to pick out the adjacent old mortar in the original walling and repoint it all together, to get a uniform finish.

Our lime mortar mixes

On our ‘working with lime mortar’ course, Hans Norling convincingly addressed a simmering dispute amongst those who use lime mortar – ratios of sand to lime. There is a common rule of thumb that it should be around 3 sand to 1 lime, by volume. It turns out this is most likely from the days when quicklime was used. When quicklime is slaked, it expands by 1.8 times. Making an equivalent mixture directly from slaked lime (using NHL or lime putty) would need nearer 2 units of sand to 1 unit of lime to get an equivalent mix.

We have made the choice to do most of our building with lime, including all the concrete blockwork more than 1m above ground. Below 1m, it will be tanked on the inside face and have the liquid DPC (synthaprufe) on the other i.e. there would be nowhere for lime mortar to breath. For those who work with cement mortar mixes of 6:1 or 4:1 and who pay £5 per bag rather than our £12 for lime, this might seem extravagant. We are paying a premium, but lime is a lot less dense than cement, so goes quite a bit further. We really do want to make the structure as breathable as possible. It is also great to work with, it stays workable for a lot longer than cement mortar. If we have left over mortar at the end of the day, we put it back in the mixer next day, add new sand and lime and carry on as normal. Cleaning up is quicker and easier. We do have hessian to keep the sun & wind off and a canvas to work under when it is wet, but most of the time, it is all very well behaved.

The downside to lime is that, over time, it starts to bind to metal objects such as trowels and the cement mixer, forming a hard crust of what I expect is calcium carbonate. In the cement mixer the mortar sticks to it, preventing it mixing properly and making it a bit of a swine to empty. At intervals I have spent a happy hour with a chisel tip in our light SDS drill, chipping it all out.

Our normal mix for non-visible mortar has indeed been 3:1 by volume, using building sand:NHL 3.5 and whilst it does go quite plastic after 20 minutes mixing, it is more workable with plasticiser added. It also tends not to stick very well as it starts to dry out. For laying blocks, we are making a slightly wetter mix which works well enough. When building rubble wall, we need the stiffer mix and stickiness is not such an issue. I quickly found the value in splatting even non-adhesive mortar into narrow gaps to fill them. If you miss, it is messy and a waste of mortar. If you get it right, it does fill all nooks and crannies. Strength-wise, 3:1 is quite adequate for us.

I experimented with increasing the lime content and decreasing the plasticiser. As I got towards 2:1 and no plasticiser, the result was indeed smoother, sticker and easier to work with for longer. It is also significantly more costly! So we will go with 3:1 for the bulk of the building, but I will use 2:1 for final pointing, where adhesion is very important. We will also be using our sharp sand from Bridgend quarry in place of building sand. We have two big bags, this should do for most of our final pointing. We will experiment with the pointing mortar at a future date, we can adjust the sharp sand by adding building sand or a coarser grit if we need to.

Training to use lime mortar

We were tipped-off by another steading-converter (the far side of Ellon from us) that a 2-day ‘working with lime mortar’ course was scheduled for the week we were arriving, to be held in Banff. This was organised by the Scottish Traditional Skills Training Centre, who do a variety of courses such as ‘managing woodland’ or ‘traditional window design’. We enquired and were instructed by Ric to attend. So we spent two days at Banff castle, about a 50 minute drive over to the Moray coast. This was run by master-mason Hans Norling, a Swede who has lived in Scotland for 16 years, giving him a most unusual accent. He co-founded his current company Masonry & Lime ltd and employs 16 staff. He was very laid back and really knew his stuff – we covered the theory & practice of picking out mortar, mixing lime mortars, pointing stonework, applying harling and using limewash. This may sound pretty dull, but when faced with loads of walling to build and several hundred square metres of picking & pointing, it has been a lifeline.

We got to meet 9 other like-minded souls including a couple over Fyvie way and, a bit spookily, the owner of a farmhouse just south of us, at Auchnabo. He is between us and our Architect, I guess his building is one of the points of light we see at night.

Most of us had some previous experience working with old stone buildings and there were sighs of relief at various points as we realised we had not irretrievably wrecked whatever we had been working on. Which is not to say that we will do a better job now we know how! My moment was when we got his blessing for using Singleton & Birch NHL 3.5 lime – good stuff, he said. They were using St Astier on the course, which gives a rather whiter finish. He was also increasingly adding quicklime to his mixes, to make them sticker and more workable and to give a softer finish. His view is that old lime mortars would have included locally-produced quicklimes.

We asked for advice on removing our 50+ square metres of concrete render along the entire north wall, he could not give us much comfort – he did unbend enough to say to use an SDS drill with chisel tip. Using mechanical tools on old stone is a bit heretical in the building preservation industry. I followed his tips and tried an area where I allowed the point to stay in any one place for only a second or two at a time. This mostly worked, the mortar was much more likely to end up crumbling and falling away, than where I left the tip in one place until it broke through the mortar. It potentially reduces the damage done to the stonework. It did not work so well where there was a thin layer of mortar strongly bonded to individual boulders. [A further tip on removing hard cement pointing from stonework, from an English Heritage publication: Run a diamond blade down the middle line of the pointing, to help break it out without damaging the stonework. I will look at getting a blade for our small angle grinder.]

Concrete blocks and lintels

To recap, all our new and replacement rubble walling must be constructed with an inner skin of standard concrete blocks laid on their sides. We tie the blockwork in to existing walling with ‘swallow-tail’ wall ties that screw into sound boulders in the old wall, with the swallow-tail part eventually getting mortared into the blockwork. We include stainless steel mesh reinforcement strips, bedded in the blockwork mortar and sticking out the side, to be able to tie the granite outer skin to.
When we are ready to build the outer skin, we paint a liquid DPM (Synthaprufe or, in our case, a cheaper substitute) on the outer face of the blocks, wait the short time for it to go off, then build the 250-300mm skin of granite rubble, as close as possible in style to the adjacent walling. Given the old walling was 450-500mm thick, some of the boulders are too wide for the new construction – we use the feathers & tare to split them.
There is no reason why the replacement walling should look any different to the original, once it is all picked and pointed.

Also to recap, all the wallheads are to be raised by 450mm. This is to lift the roof by some 45cm and give us headroom in the upper storeys of the east and west wings. We are doing the same to the single-storey north wing, to maintain the proportions of the building as a whole. We do this by laying two courses of concrete blocks widthways across the wall, lined up with the inside edge. On top of this we place two courses of blocks laid lengthways, also aligned with the inner face of the wall. The roof trusses will bear directly on wallplates laid on the raised blockwork. We completed some of this blockwork a year or two back, then got distracted onto other priorities.

Back last September, Ric and my youngest brother, Geoff, started building up the inner skin of concrete blocks across most of the building. They made good progress, getting many of our window openings defined and building the blockwork for the two gable ends in the west wing, to ground floor lintel height. We got a lot done, but had more still to do. Ric has since put concrete structural lintels over two windows and a door in the west wall of the east wing and raised the blockwork above these to the height of the old wall head. He had bult up to new wallhead heights on the remaining granite wall.

On arrival, we carried on the good work. Ric worked on the east wall of the east wing, forming the northern of the two new windows we opened up at Christmas. He could not block out the other window because we will use our splayed quoin stones and will not know the exact size and shape until we do it. This done, he took the top off the north gable end, removed the wooden inner lintel and put concrete ones in its place. He built up the inner course of concrete blockwork. The outer granite lintel is still in good condition, so was left well alone. He moved to the northwest gable wall and built blockwork above one of out Catnic steel beams. He kept going until he reached sill heights for the upstairs window.

We started by placing concrete lintels over all openings in the north wing that were ready. Where this was over new blockwork, we had room to place 2 out of the three required lintels – the third one will have to wait for us to build the granite outer course. We tidied up the blockwork above, to the level of the old wallheads, but cannot raise it to the new height until the granite outer skin is built. Over original walling, we placed all three concrete lintels, just leaving room at the front for the decorative granite lintel, then raised the wallhead by the required 45cm. We had a bit of an issue running the raised wallhead across the concrete structural lintels, the bottom course of blocks tended overhang the outside edge and sag down. We sorted that by using old slate on thinner beds of mortar, it was much better at supporting the blocks until the mortar went off. By the end of our visit, the north wing had raised blockwork over the entire length bar two openings on each side that need granite rubble to be rebuilt to old wallhead height.

This all had a transformative effect – what had been gappy tooth-like islands of old wall quite quickly became coherent and well defined runs. With the floor slab in place, it is easy to visualise the internal layout and get a reasonable feel for what the finished structure will look like. Exciting times, though there is still a lot to do before we can get the roof on.