The latter
half of May and June to date have been unseasonably cold and wet. May, for
example, was in the top quartile for rain days and the bottom quartile for
average temperatures for the last century – so says the Met Office for the ‘Scotland
East’ region. This coincided exactly with us hiring the digger and dumper from
Ellon Timber to clear the spoil from our courtyard. This was initially for a week,
but dragged out to three weeks. We got the area cleared back in May 2017 after
it filled up with spoil from drains and foundations the previous year. It
filled again, but more so, in September 2017, when we excavated the floors to
lay the concrete slab.
Ric repaired the soil sieve and over the three weeks got the whole lot sieved and cleared, some 70 tonnes. The soil component got distributed over the ground south of the bothy, including our proto lawn and under our washing line. The stone and concrete joined the existing piles beside the bothy. He took the opportunity to put drain gullies in either side of the courtyard, in line with the ends of the east & west wings. He ran them into our existing surface water drainage pipe. We levelled up and knocked pegs into the ground to ensure a slight slope towards the drains and Ric roughly levelled it all up. He was a bit short of material, but when we have decided where we want paths to go, we can use the scrapings to finish the job. It is a big relief to get it cleared up and it is much easier to visualise what we might want to do with what is a big area.
I was in Aberdeen for 8 working days near the start of July, to clear the decks before getting our floor slab laid in August/September.
Catching up with progress: Ric had got a lot done after we headed back south.
The monumental task of clearing the courtyard is well under way.
A large chunk of the courtyard cleared and levelled.
Almost all cleared!
The soil screener is remakably effective, separating concrete & stones from spoil.
This is our uncrushed concrete pile.
This is the hardcore that replaced much of our concrete pile.
In the background, the screened spoil is being re-distibuted.
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Complete the gable-end foundation
Ric had time on his last visit to lay the missing foundation for the north-west gable-end wall. I was to do the blockwork and associated concreting. The foundation is rather complicated. It includes:
- The foundation for the gable-end proper, to support the wall to one side of the future garage door. This is two leaves of blockwork, 50cm wide and some 2m long.
- The foundation of the adjoining wall on the single storey section, also two leaves of blockwork. This is set back 22cm relative to the gable-end and is about 1m long
- Tying this foundation into the Front door foundation, which is single leaf blockwork.
- The back of the gable-end foundation tying into the internal foundation that is to bear the structural timberwork for the floor joists, roof trusses, stairs and garage wall.
I measured up from as many reference points as possible, marked out the lines to follow and got going. As usual with working below ground level, I used a 1:4 mortar with plasticiser. I got the first two courses in place and filled the section with two leaves with 1:8 weak concrete. Next day I did the two remaining courses, thickening the mortar to get the required height. Because I am not sure of the finished ground level, I left the outer leaf at the same height as the inner one, I will raise it later if needed. I ran the gable-end blockwork along the full run of the foundation, it may need trimming back when we sort out the garage door, depending on what size opening we need. Anyway, it was then straightforward to run the front door and internal foundation blockwork to meet the new blockwork. Two days of effort in total.
Two courses of blocks in place.
Up to full height, four courses of blocks.
On the left is the missing wall onteh north wing, running up to the front door. On the right is the gable-end foundation running up to the garage wall.
The gable-end foundation blockwork filled with weak concrete.
The north wing foundation filled as well.
Bridging the gap between the front door foundation blockwork and the new foundation.
The foundations all joined together frpm front door to garage door.
The internal foundationthat will support our garage wall, the roof and the stairs is also connected. It needs some reconstructive surgery itself, when we get round to floor slabs.
Run an air pipe for our woodburner into the steading
Our woodburner will be used during the colder months to 1) heat hot water and 2) power the underfloor heating, supplemented by the air-sourced heat pump.
The warrant specifies an 18kW Boru Carraig Mor double-sided stove model (i.e. has glass-faced doors both sides). We did say in our conversation with the architect that we would be interested in a double-sided stove, located between the kitchen/family room and the lounge/dining room, so that we could heat both directly. However, double-sided boiler stoves are a rarity, probably for good technical reasons. We have struggled to find good reviews of this model, it is not particularly efficient (73%) and Boru stoves in general do not seem to be well rated. We will pass on it and find a higher-efficiency, better rated model. A plus for it is that it puts 13kW into water and 4kW into the rooms. With our levels of insulation that is probably about the right ratio. The majority of boiler stoves put less into water and more into the room, so we will still be quite restricted in our choices.
Whatever we decide on, we need to provide it with a source of air from outside. We decided to run 110mm pipe down then under the north wall, up into the hardcore under the slab and run an upright through the slab. The outside upright will need a cover of some sort to keep water and animals out.
I could not do the whole job because of a big pile of spoil on the inside of the wall. I dug down on the outside, then under the wall to as much over 50cm length as possible, so that the pipe would stick out the other side when we got the inside excavated. I cast a 200mm slab of strong concrete under the wall, put 100mm concrete block each side and five sections of 100mm x 50mm lintel across the blocks. For the last three lintels, I rammed dry-ish mortar up to the base of the wall, I will sort out the first two from the other side of the wall later. We were concerned about water getting into the pipework, so I dug a channel downhill to the main drain running conveniently close by and filled it with pea gravel.
I used slotted drainage pipe for the horizontal under the wall, to stop water accumulating in the pipework, the rest is to be brown pipe. I filled up the area around the pipe to lintel level with pea gravel, then covered with spoil. Less than a day of effort in total.
Hole dug down and under the steading wall from the outside.
I broke through into the surface water drain, you can see the gravel.
The concrete pad is in place below the wall.
Gravel in place to allow water to soak back into teh surface water drain.
The blockwork and lintels went in on the pad, the slotted horizontal and brown upright pipes are in place, with gravel around teh upright and spoil elsewhere.
The hole backfilled with gravel and spoil to above lintel height.
And all levelled up to finished surface.
Cap the wall heads with mortar
Back around Easter time, I got one wall covered in a layer of 1:4 mortar. This is to protect the wall head from rain soaking down into the core of the wall and freeze/thaw damaging the structure. It also provides a flat surface to lay the blockwork that will raise our roof by the 40cm specified by the warrant – to give us enough headroom in both upper and lower floors. I even got some of the blockwork in place, but had to abandon work on it because of other priorities – demolishing the gable-end wall and filling the soakaway, as I recall.
On this visit, I needed to get the remaining wall heads protected with mortar, though I knew I would not have time for the blockwork, which we cannot complete anyway without all our lintels in place.
I started on the south wall of the north section (single-storey), then did the higher walls in the west, then east sections. It took seven builds of one- or two-bays of scaffolding to get the job done – much of the time taken was constructing and dismantling, relatively little was mixing and applying the mortar. The south wall was in poor-ish condition and needed some reconstruction before laying the mortar. The others were in much better condition and quicker to sort out.
I mixed a barrow of mortar at a time and used a large flexible builders bucket to get the mortar up the scaffolding. I then poured the mortar onto the wall heads and spread it using a bricklayers trowel. I got the mortar horizontal across and along the wall to within 5mm or so using a spirit level for close-up and a scaffolding plank for the overall levels, then moved on. The whole thing was quicker and easier than I expected. Two days effort in total.
At the start…
The north wing walls need quite a bit of patching up.
This is where the roof has shed water onto the wallhead and damaged the lime mortar.
Cement mortar laid with no more than 10mm variation in height.
Now moving to the west wing.
The west wing wallheads are in disctinctly better condition than the north wing walls.
This teh north win with blockwork on one side and the new capping on the other.
Weeding
This was not planned. From a full clean out in April, our fencing, hedging, orchard and shrubby area was inundated with perennial weeds – mostly sow & common thistles, cotton (Scots) thistles, nettles, grasses, goosegrass and docks. Most were getting ready to flower, but had not done so, so I figured they could be safely composted.
I hand weeded the areas with plants we wanted to keep – all the areas with weed membrane and woodchip mulch. I made several useful observations: 1) the woodchip mulch is starting to break down and compost, meaning weeds are starting to take root above the membrane, 2) grasses creep over the edges of the weed membrane and grow roots through into the soil below, 3) many of the thistles are finding the slits in the weed membrane, pulling them up is easy and brings large amounts of horizontal tap root with them and 4) the stones we use to hold the membrane in place accumulate enough soil to allow weed seeds to germinate.
The rest of the plot I could & did strim. Our strimmer, a Stihl FS-40, is a brilliant, very capable, piece of kit which takes 2mm line. It excites our dog wonderfully. It is too light for the mature docks and cotton thistles, I used a spade to slash these off at ground level. I do need to look around for a better-designed slashing tool.
The north run of hedging + weeds.
The east run of hedging + weeds.
The south-east corner was particularly overgrown.
The fields outside the fence were overgrown.
Field boundaries sorted!
Weeded on teh left side, unweeded on the right!
I broughtthis Acer up with me and planted it in place of a deceased schrub.
Our shrubby patch needed tidying up.
Our rochard-to-be was also getting drowned by weeds.
This Bramley has fruit on it!
One of my more impressive barrow-loads of weeds.
Adn teh compost heaps were full!
All looking much better.
This is one of our copper beech trees.
Spare time
Unusually, I finished ahead of schedule. I had a full day to do the odd jobs that had been lurking in the background. Amongst other things, I tidied the bothy and hung loads of hooks, to store shovels etc..
Hooks to hang most of our building tools, plus the strimmer.
It may not look so, but this has been majorly cleaned up!
Converting a Farm Steading to our new home…
East Byreleask Steading 
