Winter

I'm not sure where the time has gone lately, so apologies for not posting over the last couple of months. Maybe I need to consider my New Years resolution for 2011!

Winter has well and truly arrived at Hillside, along with a delivery of two tonnes of wood pellets that we've been making good use of. Unlike this time last year when we were having a few teething issues with the pellet feed auger, all is well with the boiler and it's chugging along quite happily. This is as long as I remember to fill up the hopper, something that I didn't do in time a couple of weeks ago when the sub zero conditions resulted in us using far more fuel than normal.

The bitterly cold weather has meant we've had to call it a day on most jobs outside so we've restarted work on the second-fix carpentry. An opportune couple of weeks holiday between jobs has meant we've been able to get all the architraves along with most of the skirting. We've used pine even though we are painting the wood. It's not as cheap as MDF but we didn't want to use something with formaldehyde in it, let alone a material that produces very fine dust when sanded which could well turn out to be the next asbestos.

With Christmas fast approaching we've decided to go for the budget and recycled option on the tree front this year - so the circa 1980 plastic tree has been retrieved from the dark of the lost and is now decorated and illuminating one corner of the kitchen/diner, with LED lights of course!

Needless to say the freezing weather means there's very little to report on from the garden and allotment; the leeks are frozen in the ground and other than the last few potatoes from this summer's bumper crop stored in the shed there's no other produce out there. Once Christmas is over I think we'll have to start looking at what crops we want to grow in 2011. Roll on Spring!

Good reason for a bonfire

Okay, so bonfires are not renowned for being particularly great for the environment. Infact there are many environmentalists out there (particularly some members of the AECB http://www.aecb.net/) who are casting doubt on the benefits of burning biomass as a low carbon form of heating. So burning a pile of wood at this time of year to commemorate the failed attempt to blow up Parliament neither helps heat our homes nor, if we're honest, does it celebrate our seat of Government.

Despite this we'll be having a bonfire this November. It probably won't be on the 5th and I doubt we'll be organised enough to invite friends round to tramp up the muddy hill to see it. Instead it'll probably end up being me on my own making sure the fire stays under control and safely burns all that we pile on it. The reason why? To control the effect of leaf miner moths on our 100 year old Horse Chestnut tree.

Last autumn the huge tree that towers over our garden suffered from the signs of the dreaded moths, with leaves turning brown, shrivelling and falling from th

e branches long before November. There seems to be little that can be done to combat these destructive moths but I read somewhere that if you do nothing else, burn the leaves instead of composting them. So we did, although there's no way we could collect all the leaves from some a huge tree.

Looking at the tree this Autumn it looks in far better condition with the leaves just turning brown, unlike Horse Chestnuts that we pass on the way to work that have been bearing brown shrivelled leaves for weeks. I can only deduce that this is thanks to us destroying moths that would otherwise have overwintered in the dead leaves and would've been ready to attack the tree this spring.

So our bonfire will nodoubt be smokier than some, with it's abundance of leaves, but it'll be in a good cause to try and protect the iconic horse chestnut that has towered over Hillside almost since the day the cottage was first built.

Roe Deer enjoying the fruits of the horse chestnut tree

12 months

The last month has flown by, helped by our first real holiday in ages where we escaped to Cornwall for a week with no DIY. Not wanting to totally escape from talk of buildings and projects we found time call in on Graham and Isabelle to sample produce from their vast veg plot and to see what their little project looks like - http://tremayne.tumblr.com/

Meanwhile back at home Autumn has finally set in, reminding us that we moved back home a year ago today. Things have moved on massively over the year, both inside and outside the house, but it's been surprising how long some tasks have taken to complete. Laying all the oak flooring was an epic task that took up a lot of time, and prevented us from fully using the house till Easter. That's something I'm glad not to have to revisit, although we did have to cut an expansion gap in the oak downstairs at the end of September to prevent it from buckling.

With the cooler weather now here we've fired the boiler once more with the solar thermal system providing a top-up for the hot water. 1 year on it's interesting to see that we've used 7 tonnes of wood pellets. This sounds like a lot and is more than I'd hoped we'd use. But I think the combination of the extremely cold winter, a house that was incomplete when we moved back in, plus the poor thermal performance of the old parts of the cottage and teething problems with the boiler last year will all have resulted in increased pellet consumption. My aim is to make sure that the next 12 months see a significant reduction. We'll see!

Locally grown

Despite working on the house, and more recently, the garden and paving the courtyard it's been great to be able to have a good summer of growing our own. In the last couple of weeks we've dug up all the remaining potatoes (a whole barrow full) and they're now stored in a cool dark vermin-proof cupboard in the shed. Not that they'll last too long I'm sure as they are so tasty, especially the Charlottes which have beaten the other variety we grew (Jersey Royals) hands down.

Elsewhere in the garden the runner beans are still producing at daunting rate, despite blanching and freezing a load of them and we've finally got a few French beans to enjoy as well. We've pulled the last of the beetroot but still have courgettes growing and leeks in the ground to be harvested later in the year.

The ever present brambles are doing their one positive thing of the year and are now laden with blackberries, of which we've had a few but probably ought to pick and freeze a load. The raspberry canes, new in this spring, have produced a good few handfuls of fruit and our eating apple tree (Jonagold) is laden with a dozen good sized apples that I'm looking forward to tasting soon. Unfortunately the Bramley threw it's fruit earlier in the summer but hopefully that was just a symptom of it settling in to it's new home.

The greenhouse is proving it's worth now that the days are getting slightly shorter and cooler, with tomatoes and chillies ripening nicely. And with pot grown salad leaves and various herbs we've been able to enjoy a load of home grown and very tasty food this summer, with only a few 'food yards'! To top it all though, I had a conversation with Andrew our part-time farmer neighbour this evening and have put in an order for half of one of his lambs which are currently grazing in the field adjacent to our veg plot, which will make for some very locally grown meat to go with our veg.

A month of sunshine?

We've had the solar thermal system running for a complete month now so it's a good time to see how it's been performing. The TD3 controller that Navitron supplied with it stores all sorts of useful data so assessing how it's doing is a simple task.

August, as is so often the case, proved to be a month with plenty of cloud and several dull wet days when there was little if any heat gained from the system. We had to use the electric immersion heater to boost the water temperature on a few occasions as a result. Even so the system generated 273 kwh of hot water during the month, saving us approximately £10. Not a lot when you consider the cost of the system but not bad for a very grey month. It'll be interesting to see how September fares, as we're only two days in and it's already generated more than 10% of what we saw in August thanks to clear blue skies.

And we're not letting the plentiful hot water go to waste either, as we spend this week laying 80 square metres of paving slabs to turn the muddy area at the back of the kitchen/diner into the courtyard, so hot showers are proving a good way to soothe aching muscles!

Levelled

Between the showers and brief appearances of sun today (it is August after all!) we dug over the new shed base. As with most of the 'allotment', a significant amount of back breaking effort had to be put in to removing brambles and their roots. Last weekend's bonfire had helped but there were still plenty of roots in the clay.

This, combined with trying to get some semblance of a level site for the timber shed, made it quite a task. That said we've now got the site prepared ready for the erection of the shed tomorrow, using four of our ample collection of old pallets as the base. The plan is also to extend the front of the shed with a 'veranda' using more pallets and old decking that we've collected, but that's a job for another time as it's way down the list. Mind you, when we had our afternoon coffee break sitting in front of the shed site we were able to see the hills of East Wales and the Tyndale Monument to the North (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndale_Monument) whilst listening to the sounds of sheep bleating in the field next door, so this could be a great place to escape to with a cuppa in future and may have to be propelled up the 'To do' list.

Meanwhile the veg plot is continuing to provide a plentiful supply of potatoes, beetroot, courgettes and beans to accompany the pot grown salad leaves and tomatoes.

Glazed

The greenhouse is now full of glass. Okay, so one panel is plywood to replace a long broken piece of glass and a couple of other panes are cracked. But other than these all the glass is in place so we've started relocating plants into it. A couple of chilli plants that were in the kitchen-diner are rehoused, with their fruit turning red as a result, along with most of our tomato plants. Thanks to the sunny dry summer we've managed to grow a decent amount of tomatoes outside against a south facing wall with the first fruit just ripening - and now with the greenhouse this should speed up.

Over the past few winters the lack of a greenhouse has resulted in us losing a few tender plants, mostly fuschias, but also a few pelargoniums and even a tree fern. Hopefully the greenhouse will help to prevent this in future.

We've also cleared a huge patch of brambles and blackthorn so that we can erect the new shed. With a few weeks of clear evenings we may be able to get this sorted soon, and then relocate the log store before autumn arrives. It'll also mean we can then finally say goodbye to the old woodshed that lurks beneath the horse-chestnut tree.

Digging in the dirt

The builders filled several skips of rubble and other rubbish during the build. In order to limit what they sent 'away' to landfill in the skips we kept an eye on what they disposed of, especially easily recyclable cans and plastic bottles, timber that we could reuse or burn, and bricks or other hardcore that could be reused somewhere in the garden.

As a result of this we've been left with a huge mound of rubble to the side of the house that has been earmarked to provide a base for the terrace at the rear of the house. With the builders having left site almost a year ago now the mound has become a familiar site as we approach the front door, so much so we've hardly noticed it of late. With the plan to order materials for the terrace before the summer is over, we decided it was time to tackle the mound at the weekend.

We'd hoped that the builders had taken on board our request to segregate waste and that it would just be a pile of bricks, blockwork, tiles and other debris from the cutting the holes into the rear of the house. Unfortunately, when we disturbed the mound during the heat of the weekend the smell we encountered confirmed that wasn't the case. Not that we found any food waste, or worse, in the mound. It was all debris from the house. Mostly it was inert rubble (bricks, broken tiles and blockwork) with some pieces of metal, small amounts of plastic (broken lightswitches etc), none of which would have been decomposing to produce the smell. The two offending items we found though were wood and plasterboard. Both of the latter produce gases as they biodegrade, with plasterboard a particular problem in landfill sites where it results in hydrogen sulphide being produced. Not something we want in our garden, and certainly not under the terrace!

So our afternoon of moving the rubble mound to the rear of the house also entailed a sifting of the waste so that we didn't rebury the offending items. Instead yet another bonfire pile has appeared, the metal recycling heap is larger than it was, and with a pang of guilt we sent the plasterboard 'away' in our black wheelie bin. But at least the mound has diminished and we can now measure up to see what additional hardcore we need to bring in to provide the base for the terrace.

Greenhouse

We'd been looking for a second-hand greenhouse on Freecycle for while when friends (Jess & Yinka) mentioned in passing that their new house came with a 6' by 8' greenhouse that they didn't want. Not something that would go well with their 6 year old son and his desire to kick a football!

So a couple of months ago, just after they moved in, we visited them armed with spanners etc and dismantled the aluminium framed greenhouse. The iPhone captured a few key photos and mother-in-law (who was visiting that weekend), sketched the general layout of the frame whilst C stuck labels onto the structural parts.

Since then the structure has lain in the 'allotment' waiting for us to build a base. We finally did this last weekend using old bricks, patio slabs and crushed plant pots for hardcore. So we were able to start putting the frame up,only to find most of the labels had faded, the sketches didn't capture all the relevant details and the iPhone pics weren't as clear as I'd hoped!

However, some common sense and a couple of bags of new bolts later (to replace those that'd sheared off) the frame is now up. We just need to rescue the glazing from the advancing brambles before cleaning it off and putting it into the frame so that we have a sun trap for our tender plants. It'll also be a place to ripen off any tomatoes if the rain that has appeared over the past week persists for the rest of the summer.

Best laid plans...

Okay, so I didn't quite finish off the installing the solar thermal system after my last post. With the system all pressure tested and leak free I installed 6 of the evacuated tubes to see what effect they would have for starters. As the tubes can be damaged if left in the sun without the heat being taken away I didn't want to risk damaging the full complement of 30.

It was probably just as well as an annoying intermittent electrical fault plagued me for a few weeks! This meant several fuses blew, some 3 amp from the fused spur supplying the TD3 controller, along with a couple of the special fuses in the controller itself. Thankfully the guys at Navitron posted several spares at no cost. Finally I tracked down the power spike to an extra 'stat that I'd wired up, thinking it would give me additional control. The TD3 came with three sensors (1 for the panel, 2 for the cylinder; top and bottom) but I thought it'd be good to use a spare mains 'stat that was supplied with the cylinder. It appears that this was producing a power surge every time the water temp dropped below 60C, blowing the fuses.

All this has coincided with weekends of visitors and a weekend in Dorset so there's not been much DIY time for a while. The last weekend was the first opportunity to fiddle with the system once more, adding a high temperature automatic air vent at the high point, before finally installing all 30 tubes. This proved to be an easy task, just as in the Youtube video. Interestingly it was overcast when I put a batch of 10 tubes out on the roof, and the 15 mins or so it took me to nstall them was long enough for the copper tail on the last tube to be hot to touch, so definitely not something to do on a sunny day.

The last thing I have to complete is installing the final few reflectors, strips of aluminium that clip between the tubes to bounce light onto the back of the tubes to increase the system efficiency. This evenings rain stopped me from doing this. But this is just a final tweak as the system is up and running, generating our hot water for the rest of the summer, and hopefully well into Autumn. So the biomass boiler has been switched off and we can now enjoy 'free' hot water. The TD3 controller keeps a detailed tally of how much energy the system generates, so I'll have to give an update in a few weeks on how quickly (or not) the system will pay for itself.

Getting warmer

Okay, so time during our week off was spent painting the outside of the house in Lime paint and as a result the solar thermal system didn't get very far. Life since then has been consistently busy (hence the lack of posts) so the system isn't yet fully installed. Not having quite the right fittings and running out of PTFE tape for the compression fittings hasn't helped.

However, I ought to note that so far it's been easy to install the Navitron system. As per their YouTube video you need a couple of people to install the frame and fix it to the roof structure, but other than that it's an easy one person job. I've also completed most of the plumbing and most of the wiring, which have proven to be pretty straightforward. Tomorrow should see me complete the installation, fill the system with water and pressure test it. Then I'll need to dose it with glycol, fill it back up with water and if it's all okay I can then install the tubes. We can then start harnessing some of the fantastic sunshine that we've been having of late.

Hot water

When we had the new hot water cylinder installed last year we made sure that it had two heating coils, one for heating from the pellet boiler, the other for solar water heating. And finally we've got to a position with work elsewhere in the house being well advanced so we can plan to do the solar hot water installation and use the second coil.

We've investigated a load of solar hot water system suppliers and a while back fixed on Navitron as our preferred supplier. Along with a comprehensive website full of useful information, they supply DIY solar kits at significantly less cost that some of the major solar retailers who want to supply and install systems. And at the end of a long building project we can't afford to pay somebody else to install our solar system so DIY seems to be the best option. So I'm looking forward to seeing exactly how these things go together!

We placed the order last Friday for the solar array (an aluminium frame with 30 glass tubes to catch the heat), pump, pressure system, specially insulated pipework, controller and a few pipework fittings and they were all delivered on Monday. Looks like a fascinating set of bits, but I'm glad it's so easy to get onto our house roof as I wouldn't want to climb a scaffold with the fragile glass tubes.

So the plan with a week off next week followed by a Bank Holiday weekend is that we should have plenty of time to do the solar installation along with a few other major jobs we have planned. Who knows, we may even have some time off!

Whatever happens, the plan is to soon be in a position where we can switch the boiler off fully until the autumn, with all hot water provided by the solar system. I've a bit more reading up to do first as it's going to be important to get the control of the system working correctly. Hopefully everything else will be as easy as it sounds on the Navitron website.

Fire

According to the lady who grew up in Hillside the old dining room used to have a Parkray woodburner installed, but that was long gone when we moved in. Instead the fireplace was a bare and incomplete hole, with a nasty grey tiled hearth that blended in well with the bare concrete floor. As a result it was never our favourite room. The fact it was always freezing cold didn't help, and the only time we tried using the fireplace was a disaster with the smoke blowing back into the room.

Now in it's new role as the front hall, with the oak door, floor, and now pristine white skirting, the room has a new lease of life more befitting it's place as the entry point to the new Hillside. But the grey fireplace still exists to remind us of how it was. So we've been looking for an inexpensive way to turn the fireplace into something that is more inkeeping with the cottage and it's new decor. £300 would buy us a reclaimed cast iron fireplace not unlike the two that have been retained in the old bedrooms, and less would buy us a new Repro' fire. We've tried to avoid new, after all re-use is the second of the three R's and is fundamental to a lot of what we're doing. Not happy with paying that much for a fireplace that will hardly ever get used we've trawled the 'net to no avail for a few weeks.

Sure enough though, Ebay finally came up trumps and we've located, bid for and won a compact and understated reclaimed fireplace that will look perfect in the hall. We collected the fireplace a few weeks ago from somebody doing a similar renovation near Radstock so were able to empathise with one another on the joys of living on building sites. All we need to do now is source a hearth and we can then install the fire to complete the room. We're thinking of using slate, as we have with the woodburner in the lounge, and once a few other more essential things come off the 'todo' list it'll get sorted.

Solar Gain

After one of the coldest winters I can remember it's been great to feel the warmth of Spring sunshine over the past few days.

When we designed the kitchen/diner extension we wanted to ensure we captured 'good' warmth from the sun, or 'solar gain', whilst avoiding 'bad' solar gain. Capturing the good at this time of the year is working - over the past few days the extension has been warmed by sunlight that has streamed in via the extensive amounts of glazing to such an extent that the heating in this room has switched off. With large windows on the east and south sides of the extension, the low March sun reaches deep into the room, heating up the limestone floor and other surfaces. The warm surfaces then radiate the free warmth into the room.

All this is great, but what we don't want to experience is the typical conservatory greenhouse effect that blights too many UK homes. As a relatively inexpensive way of gaining extra living space many homeowners add glazed conservatories onto their homes, often on south or west facing walls. This means that a room which is pleasant in the Spring and Autumn gets the full force of the summer sun, becomes too hot to use during the summer months and transfers the excess heat into the rest of the house compounding the problem.

To avoid this from happening with our extension we've incorporated a few key design elements. Unlike a conservatory the roof isn't glazed, so only sunlight at a low angle can penetrate deep into the room, e.g. Spring and Autumn sun. The roof has generous overhangs so that during the hottest times of the day in the summer when the sun is almost overhead, little direct sunlight will enter the room. Deciduous trees on the south and west boundaries of our garden provide the additional solar control, with the bare trees allowing in Spring sunlight but once they are in full leaf they will soak up the unwanted heat of summer.

Only time will tell if what we have designed will work fully as intended, assuming we get a hot summer of course. I wonder which is least likely...

Brushes

When I cleaned out the hearth of the Ecoflex boiler last month I ignored the couple of lines in the manual that stated you should clean the soot tubes. After all, I've been expecting winter to end for a while now and this was something I'd planned to do once the heating was less in demand.

However, I've noticed over the past few weeks that the boiler has struggled to get up to temperature when starting from cold on days when it's been cold and frosty, of which we've had too many still. This wasn't an issue when we saw the worst of the winter weather so it seems there has been a drop off in efficiency in the boiler. The only likely reason for this, or so I've assumed, is due to 'fouling' in the boiler - a build up of ash and soot which reduces the heat transfer efficiency from the firebox into the hot water. So I decided it was important to revisit the cleaning and get out the soot brush.

When the boiler was delivered the plumber was very quick to give me the brush for the boiler. It's a square wire brush on a 3 foot handle. Re reading the detail of the manual it refers to a short and long brush - weird, we only have one brush.....

Turns out that two brushes are needed to clean the boiler soot tubes - a short one for the square tubes and a long one, almost 5 foot long, for the round tubes. 6 months after taking delivery of the boiler, and with no idea where the original long brush went (if we ever received it), I decided it was easier to buy a new one direct from Nuway which was delivered this week. So this weekend I was able to remove a significant amount of soot from both the square and round tubes using the two brushes. The long brush almost got stuck a couple of times which was slightly unnerving. With the arrival of much milder weather (At last!) it may be that the boiler is finally going to be in far less demand and it'll be difficult to see how much the efficiency improves after using the brushes. Even if this is the case, I'm sure brushing out the soot will have helped heat transfer within the boiler and made it more efficient as a result.

All of this is another illustration of the additional time and effort it takes to heat with biomass - so it's not something to take on lightly.

Scrubbed

Since my post on Sofa's last month we've eventually become the owners of 25 year old Chesterfield, acquired via friends of friends who are also in the midst of a renovation project, albeit one that has taken more than four years and they've still got a way to go.

The sofa arrived in a trailer looking a very dark brown but we thought we ought to give it a wipe down before using it....

Four washes later, including saddle soap as we were concerned the effect that washing up liquid and water were having on the leather, it looks a lot better and a fair bit lighter. The leather is still a nice dark brown, maybe slightly more tan than dark chocolate. To counter potential damage that the washing has done to the leather, removing the natural oils and drying it out, we've applied a leather oil comprising beeswax and lanolin. Bought from the local tack shop this is used to keep saddles and tack in top condition by feeding them and keeping them waterproof. The latter isn't an issue for the Chesterfield but it certainly needed feeding after the washes we've given it. (I say 'we', but it was mostly C who scrubbed it down.)

So, we're now the proud owners of another great bit of recycled furniture, which with a little more care and attention should last plenty more years yet. After our fruitless searching for new sofas and other chairs that are comfortable, affordable, well made and meet our ethical/environmental choices, it's great to have additional seating that has, with the exception of a few miles, some water, soap and elbow grease, made very little recent impact on the environment.

Service

One of the disadvantages of technological progress is that you need an expert to maintain and repair things - take a look under the bonnet of any car made in the past few years and you'll know exactly what I mean. This also applies to many domestics appliances. Add in a gas supply, as you would for a boiler, and you have to be Corgi or (as it's now known) Gas Safe registered. This isn't the case for solid fuel appliances.

Our Ecoflex pellet boiler has been running for 4 months now, and thanks to the bitterly cold weather it's been running at full load for much of the last 2! A few fault messages combined with the manual stating that it needs cleaning a couple of times per year prompted me to try dismantling it and giving it a clean/service last weekend.

I was pleased to find that it's pretty straightforward, with cleaning mostly comprising the removal of the burner and emptying ash and other deposits from the burner hearth. We've had some sintering (build up of gravel like particles) due to the ash becoming super heated, but this isn't unusual and as long as it's cleaned out regularly isn't expected to become a problem.

One of the two fault messages were 'check gate', which turns out to be a bad translation from the original Swedish and relates to an LED sensor in the pellet feed. A quick wipe with a cloth removed a build up of wood dust that was affecting this. The other was 'flame detector'; within the burner housing is a glass enclosed thermocouple and the glass had become blackened by ash and smoke. Another quick wipe with a cloth removed this and solved the problem.

I was relieved to get the boiler back together, and even more relieved that it fired up without any problems. So, okay,it needs more maintenance than a regular gas or oil boiler, but other than my time it doesn't cost anything to service. Long may that be the case!

Sofa, so good?

With the ground floor complete, except reinstating the reused skirting, our thoughts have moved on to additional furniture.

Our two existing sofas have done sterling service over the past 8 years and we have no plans to get rid of them as they're still in good shape, quite literally. Not bad considering they're covered in a cream cotton fabric. Goes to show that it was worth paying slightly more for good build quality from the Sofa Workshop.

That said, with the extra space we now have we'd like some additional seating so we've spent some time looking for another sofa. Not as easy as it sounds, even with the temptation of the New Year Sales.

Our existing sofas still look good partly due to build quality, partly due to simple modern design. We've been able to rule out a vast array of the sofas on the market due to fussy and over detailed design, especially most of what DFS sell. In other stores where the furniture initially looked attractive, such as Next, we ruled out their sofas as they were upholstered in either artificial fabrics or leather with excessive numbers of seams. (We've still not decided on leather or fabric - if it's fabric it'll have to be natural, ensuring it's sustainable and limiting our exposure to toxins. And we recognise that leather production can be a very polluting process even if the hides are a by product of the meat industry, so it's not an easy decision to make)

Sofas from other stores have been tempting, especially with some of the deals that are available, but there's always been something to stop us reaching for our wallet. Usually this has been build quality, as not only is it not financial sense to buy cheap and have to replace it in a few years, it's a poor use of resources.

We've even looked in our local second-hand shop but there's nothing there that suits us - after all we want to be eco and chic at the same time, albeit maybe not quite to Oliver Heath's standard (http://www.ecohomeideas.co.uk)

So three options remain:

1. Find a cool secondhand sofa, and with a friend of a friend getting rid of a Chesterfield this may happen.

2. Return to Sofa Workshop and dig deep into the bank account - we know we'll be happy with the UK made quality product, but it comes at a cost.

3. Find another supplier of UK made and sustainable furniture - Green Woods in Clifton http://www.greenwoodsfurniture.co.uk/ seem to fit the bill so we'll have to pay them a visit.

Alternatively we could just sit on the floor. Not sure all our visitors would be keen on that though.

Level

We finally completed the laying of the oak flooring in the hallway today. My very sore fingers, partly due to the cold weather but mostly due to cuts from the oak floorboards, are testament to the job of putting the floor down. But, and even without being oiled or finished with skirting, the floor looks great so the minor discomfort is a small price to pay.

What probably took as long as laying the last lot of boards was deciding on what to do with the fireplace that is in the hall, and what used to be the dining room. Old deeds of the house refer to a Parkray stove being in that room, but unfortunately that was long gone when we bought the house. Instead we inherited a bare hole of a fireplace with a raised hearth of anonymous grey ceramic tiles. Combined with the very uneven bare concrete floor, this made the dining room a not particularly pleasant space!

So we've been researching a replacement to the Parkray that will do justice to the house, and that is in keeping with it's age and the style of the original Edwardian cast iron fire places in the bedrooms. A visit to Period Fireplaces in Montpelier, Bristol was helpful but they didn't have quite what we wanted in stock. However, they did give us enough info and inspiration to allow us to fix on a approximate fireplace size and, more importantly, hearth size. This has enabled us to finish the oak flooring knowing exactly where we'll put the hearth, and how big it needs to be. To avoid having a wood trim around the hearth we'll put in a sub-hearth of self-levelling screed and float the final hearth (possibly localish Welsh slate) ove the oak.

And whilst we've not really had chance to appreciate it, at long last the floor in the hall is now fully level, with the drab grey concrete gone from view and replaced by the warm tones of solid oak. Offcuts of which have been doing sterling service keeping us warm in the stove!

Deep freeze

Work on the house has taken a back seat over the last few weeks. After getting the oak floor layed and oiled in time for Christmas, and with the essential doors hung for privacy, it's been time to have a bit of a break.

The record breaking freezing weather we're having is taking up more time, be it ensuring we have enough wood for the stove or topping up the boiler pellets and emptying the ash at a faster rate than we ought to be. That's one of the downsides of biomass, higher maintenance especially when it's colder than is normal for the UK.

In the brief moments I've had to enjoy the snow that surrounds Hillside, when I've not been at work, it's been interesting to see signs of the nocturnal wildlife, especially the deer tracks outside the front of the garage.


Last month I mentioned that we'd survived -6C without the harvested rainwater pipework freezing where it runs above ground for a couple of metres. Unfortunately last nights -8C and a full day of sub-zero temperatures finally caused the system to freeze up so we can't use it for flushing the WCs. Hopefully no damage has been done, and at least we still have mains water so can top-up the cisterns manually, although I suppose we really ought to be out collecting snow to fill the cisterns. Maybe not tonight...