Easter Visit

We arrived on site a week after Ric had been obliged to head south for a fortnight. We agreed a shortlist of priorities for the following weeks: Start capping what is left of the walls with mortar and blockwork, to protect them from another winter of rain and ice; pull down the north-east gable-end wall (the one with half the foundations missing); finish the surface water drain including filling the soakaway with rubble; clean out the concrete tank; screen spoil, distribute it and level up the courtyard; prepare for the floor slab. Too much to do in the time we have, but we will see how we get on.

Caravan: We planned to stay in the caravan most of the time, with twice-a-week visits to Bucksburn. We brought a 3KW electric heater up with us, swapped our empty gas bottle and got hold of a third one. The first night we were freezing, we went to a supermarket the next day and bought second duvets as well as missing utensils. Once we mastered the art of putting the heating on at the right time, we were very comfortable and quickly benefited from the extra time not spent driving to and from Aberdeen. The water heater was wonderful, good hot showers, reasonable flow rates.

Mobile Coverage: I have changed my mobile service provider from EE to Tesco Mobile. I can usually get two bars of 4G in the caravan and because I can use all my data for tethering, I have better connectivity than in Bucksburn.

Jill is on Vodafone, which also has decent reception. This got tested out for real whilst we were there. Jill’s sister, Vicki, and family were on holiday in Iceland. One of them ended up in hospital and needed a scanned image of their EHIC card. We persuaded Jill’s mum, Lesley, to find the card then to get one of her friends to take the photograph and email it to us. Jill forwarded it using MMS to our niece, Lucy, at the hospital in Reykjavic. Job done. We can use our caravan in north-east Aberdeenshire as a global communications hub!

Misty: Our blue merle collie cross was suspicious for a day or so, but got to appreciate being able to get out of the cold and wet. She spent all day being excited by anything and everything going on. As last year, it took its toll – she got so exhausted she was reduced to lying in her basket to eat her food. We supplemented her diet with extra dog meat.

Caravan: We sorted the longstanding niggle about the caravan sloping to one side. We bought a 4-tonne bottle jack and I cut some plywood shims. I crawled underneath the caravan to where we had put the frame on concrete blocks last year, I jacked up the low side and pushed the shims in. It pushed the side up about 3cm and that was enough to sort out the tilt. I also greased the jacking points, which were getting quite rusty and difficult to turn.

Garden: It is a great time to be in the area, with spring springing. Jill had planted daffodils and snowdrops last year in what we had hoped was a safe area, they were in bloom.

Hedging: She gave all our hedging a good spring clean. She removed the tree tubes, cleared debris and weeds away and pruned them. A remarkably small number had died. Most were bursting into life and had not yet been cut back to tree-tube height by rabbits/hares. The latter may have plenty of other food at the moment, hopefully the hedging will get big enough to simply out-grow pests. We used a tray of hedging plants that Jill’s mum had been bringing on, to replace those that had not survived.

Orchard: We extended our future orchard in the south east corner. Jill had found another end-of-season bargain online and ordered four new bare-rooted fruit trees – apple ‘Falstaff’, apple ‘James Grieve’, apple ‘Ashmeads Kernel’ and plum ‘Victoria’. Driving up, we had stopped at Morrisons in Berwick-upon-Tweed and bought one each of cherry ‘Morello’ and cherry ‘Stella’. They are now safely planted.

Broken Glass: We did another sweep of the grounds removing broken glass that had surfaced since the last clean-up – we are still filling a bucket or two over the course of a year.

Japanese Knotweed: Had not broken the surface yet!

Rhubarb: We cropped it for the first time and stewed it!

We added a second lot of fruit trees to our orchard.

Raised drainage mound: We took time out from our more physical tasks to pin down where we would build the raised drainage mound that will take effluent from our septic tank and allow it to soak away through our otherwise not-very-permeable and high-water-table grounds. There was not a lot of choice, we found a 10m x 7m area where the concrete ramp had been, a safe distance from our boundaries and soakaway, avoiding our area of new fruit trees and the established ash/sycamore trees. Ric worked out that we could minimise the visual impact by flattening the area uphill of where the mound will be, by dumping screened spoil and levelling it. The mound will either line up with the levelled area, or will stick up a bit, but not much. What we are not sure about is whether it needs to be separated from the levelled area by a trench, or could just be an extension of it. I will check with the architect at some point.

The Festive season

Planning: We had done a little planning over the run up to Christmas. We were to be in Aberdeen for the best part of two weeks, but with little steading time.
I needed to correct the problem Building Standards pointed out with our foul drain – swapping a 90 degree bend with two 45 degree bends in our backdrop to the main bathroom inspection chamber. I bought the extra bits to take up with me.
We renewed our public liability insurance for the site.
I endeavoured to contact Stevenson & Kelly, who are based near Balmedie and manufacture roof trusses. This was not initially successful with my emails getting lost. Once I got a direct contact email address, just before Christmas, I was in.
On site:

We had put webbing straps over each end of the caravan, attached to large granite boulders, to stop the caravan blowing over. One strap had worked itself off. Both showed wear marks on the caravan skin where metal parts had rubbed against the metal skin of the caravan. Clearly we had had strong winds between September and Christmas. I put the missing strap back and wrapped padding around the metal parts to stop them rubbing directly.

I had had a roll of heavy duty windbreak netting delivered, to put along the southern boundary, which is where our strongest & most regular winds seem to come from. It was a perforated plastic mesh rather than netting, I used a pack of removable cable ties to fix it on.

I dug up the main bathroom inspection chamber, disconnected the backdrop and pulled the rodding point out from the chamber riser. Oddly enough, the two 45 degree bends fitted exactly where the 90 degree bend had been and I was able to slot it all back together, switching the junction that included the rodding point round 90- degrees so that it provided access down the backdrop rather than up the drain into the steading. No trimming to size needed. I did not have a spare riser, so I put the one with the rodding hole on top of the other one. We can swap it back out next year if needed. I took photos and emailed them to Building Standards. They did not reply before we left to go south, so I filled the trench up to the level of the second riser.

We had realised that we did not drain our water heater back in September and feared for it. Quite rightly. I put the water back on and noticed drops of water appearing underneath. I pulled the cover off but could not see where the water came from. I did track it down – a pinhole in the pipe that takes heated water out of the combustion chamber that carried a tiny jet of water over the wall of the cupboard where it ran down. I consulted with Ric and decided that there may be other leaks waiting to show themselves – we will buy a new heater.

Out daughter Mairi & boyfriend Ian were up and wanted to do something – I gave them breaking bars and got them to open up the missing window in the south-facing wall of our single-storey section.

I planted out our four bargain fruit trees bought last May – Egremont Russet apple, Worcester Pearmain apple, Bramley’s Seedling apple and Merryweather damson – in our orchard patch in the south-west corner of our plot, we had laid out the weed membrane last September. I used our roll of plastic mesh to make rabbit guards for the trees. We had to sort out the area of conifers we had planted on the north side of our plot last September. Most of the rabbit guards were leaning at angles, two had removed themselves and were on our concrete pile. It looked as though they had been wind-blasted. The conifers had suffered badly, but we patched up the guards and put extra stakes in to hold them down.

Right at the end we went over to see another couple who are converting a steading, the far side of Ellon. They are living in a caravan with their two children, have an L-shaped steading and 4.5 acres of field. They have a sheltered access from their caravan into a large shed/workshop. They will work with a builder to get the steading watertight, rather the way Ric is helping us out, then finish the rest themselves. It is good to know others who are in a very similar position to ourselves. They are even expected to build a raised drainage mound as well!

 

This is what the straps should look like.

This is what it looked like on arrival, it got fixed.

Heavy weight windbreak in place!

The leaky water heater.

Misty keeping a close eye on my efforts.

Backdrop corrected as per Building Standards.

Ian & Mairi at work opening the new window on the south wall.

Done, about 70 cm above expected floor level.

Weed membrane in place for our to-be-orchard.

And r first four fruit trees planted.

Our shrubby area on the north side of the plot.