Housework
Monday, April 18th, 2011Both buildings on the quinta are being worked on at the moment. A while ago we fitted locally-made chestnut doors and windows to the smaller building, and today it got a new roof.
Posts Tagged ‘round pole timber construction’
Balcony and trellis
Monday, April 11th, 2011We’ve started work on the larger building again. Or, to be more precise, a local team of joiners has started work. We’d planned on doing this with help from local friends, but reassessed when their own building project took off and we got to scratching our heads over where we were going to source sufficient sweet chestnut poles for the job. I’ve been buying some from the Presidente of the local junta (and the previous owner of this quinta) who has a pile of old, well-seasoned chestnut vigas that have been lying about for the best part of the last decade, but he doesn’t have enough, or enough of the right size, for what I had in mind. In the end, it was going to be quicker and far more economical to call in the team, since the team come complete with the wood.
Yurt porch
Saturday, November 6th, 2010Finished 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
Floorless
Friday, November 5th, 2010Building work on the quinta has been progressing really well lately, despite us beginning to have to watch the weather forecast to plan what we do from day to day. Rain is forecast for next week, so today we removed one of the floors to clean and preserve the chestnut beams so we’ll have something we can get on with under cover next week.
No floor!
Today’s progress
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010
A porch for the yurt
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010Having 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.
Do Be Do Be Do
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010“To be is to do – Socrates
To do is to be – Sartre
Do Be Do Be Do – Sinatra”
Kurt Vonnegut
Somewhere in that quote above is all sorts of wisdom about Doing and Being, but the trouble is I’m so much in the Doing right now there’s no room in my head for reflections on the subject. So I’m sticking with Sinatra for the moment …
Still more roof
Thursday, August 26th, 2010This week the roof is really starting to look like a roof from the outside as well as the inside. Monday we laid the insulation (50mm cork) on top of the boards of maritime pine, followed by the waterproof breathable membrane. No sooner had that gone down than the weather decided to test it out. We haven’t had a drop of rain since we took the roof off back at the beginning of July (well, apart from a 15-minute shower of dirt) and it waited until the very moment we got the waterproofing on. Considerate weather! Damn! When you’ve lived in Scotland for more than half your life, that’s a real novelty.
