One thing I’ve really missed since setting up home in the yurt has been an oven. We have a 30 year-old camping gas stove out of an old VW campervan with two burners and a grill, plus the wood burning stove to cook on, but no oven. No fresh home-made bread. No cookies. No roasts. No oven-baked vegetables. It’s been hard …
No matter how much effort goes into the attempt to get it right first time, inevitably, and most especially with experimental technologies, there’s a teething problem or two …
With rainy days becoming more frequent now – so that finally, after a long dry summer, there’s more than 1 litre per second coming down the barroco – we’ve had the chance to finally commission our water wheel installation and see how much power it’s capable of generating.
Finished at last, complete with arty-farty bits of tree. Not quite so easy to dismantle as originally intended, but still a stand-alone structure that’s not fixed to the yurt, and which allows the covers to be removed every year. The sawmill offcuts morphed into rough timber boards – there weren’t enough offcuts left of a suitable thickness.
The simple side, the walnut strut
Yesterday the delivery of sand and cement we’d been waiting for arrived, so this morning we got started at 8:30am laying the lower slab for the log store.
While I fetched and carried buckets of water, Ema took charge of the cement mixer.
I was hoping to have shots of the progress on the second log shed that would show us much further on by now, but as usual we’re waiting on deliveries of more materials. Promised Monday and as of today (Wednesday), still not here. Sigh!
Having put the finishing touches to log store number 1 yesterday, today we got started on another one!
With all our heating and cooking to be fueled by timber from our woods, one thing we can’t have enough of is space to store firewood and keep it well aired and dry, so part of the renovations to the two buildings on the quinta include provision for a decent amount of log storage adjacent to each.
No. Not for the houses. STILL waiting on a delivery of more stone (over a month now) and the previous owner removing his stuff (over a year and a half now) before we can progress either of those …
The frustrations of waiting on a succession of Other People before I can get on with what I want to get on with were starting to get to me yesterday. Not only were there the ‘more schist’ and ‘less shit’ items above, I was also expecting a delivery from the local builders’ merchants, some parts of which were already a week overdue.
It’s amazing the difference a day makes …
Or, to be more accurate, a downpour and a bit of wind.
Having cut the timber from our woodland and let it dry sufficiently to be unsticky enough to handle (just), I got started on constructing the porch framework over the last 2 days.
Laying out and levelling porch floor area.
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