Fallen Apple Farm

I spent the morning scraping out the crumbly mortar in the rocks between the joist ends in the red room. Rocks came out with it, and I was feeling a bit more grim with each one (it’s ok this is only a load bearing wall that I’m taking literal boulders out of).

A couple of the joist ends look a bit worse than I originally thought. Look at this one not supporting anything at all, just being held up by nails in the floorboards above!

Don’t worry, the dark patch is an antifungal thing painted on. Probably pointless, but won’t do any harm at least.

Took a long time to chisel out enough rock in a couple of places so we could slide in the joist plates. Bolting them to the joists wasn’t easy either – Tim smacked himself fully in the face when a socket wrench slipped off a bolt. He’s thinking he may have broken his nose.. it is looking a bit wonky now ?

But we managed to get two plates on this afternoon. It doesn’t seem like a lot but chiselling rock in such small gaps is a bit tricky.

The joists between those also need doing but they need a bunch more chiselling under them that I just couldn’t face or had time for. My shoulders aren’t thanking me this evening. Still, we made progress ?

The electrician is making progress! We have a fancy new fuse box that doesn’t crackle, Tim’s and the boys’ wall sockets are done and the red room is done. He will be doing the infrared panels in those rooms next time. For now, we can actually start painting walls and other nice things that aren’t dusty. Well.. I’ll tape and fill the joins between the wallboards and put skirting board down and architrave round the doors first which yes, I know will take a few weeks but my brain is only saying “I can paint now?!”

On another note while we are in the red room which won’t always be red but the name might stick for some time: after pulling the ceiling down I noticed the ends of the joists don’t look too great.

After a bit of anxious research, it doesn’t appear to be too bad. I bought some joist splice plates to give them some more support, Tim will help me put those in this week.

Taking the ceiling down was its own special type of pain in the arse. The space between the joists was full of grain husks, concrete dust and dead spiders. For insulation I guess? Taking a board down meant being showered with the detritus mentioned above and it was awful.

That picture really doesn’t show the depth of misery that fell down my shirt and into my hair. But it’s done now and I’ll never have to do it again!

If you guessed somewhere between 20-50 then congratulations, you are not even close. Not even a little. We knew we had saplings being delivered, and not really any idea of what to expect and how they’d be delivered, but..

We didn’t expect them to be literal twigs! All those twigs in there are individual cuttings to be planted. When Trees on the Land reviewed our land etc, we figured they knew what they were doing when they said they’d send us 450 trees for free. We raised an eyebrow at the time, but now it makes sense!

Side note to praise the non-profit Trees on the Land! Here’s a snippet from their site https://www.treesontheland.com/

Trees on the Land is a cross-border initiative working to establish young native trees across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Our vision is to establish tree cover and woodland in rural and urban areas that will grow for many years and provide valuable resources, beneficial ecosystem services and a lasting legacy for future generations.

We plant small woodlands, orchards, hedgerows, shelter belts, coppice, wood-pasture, agroforestry, individual trees, rows and avenues of trees, landscape and amenity trees, reforestation sites and larger woodlands. We have planted more than a million trees at several thousand sites since 2013.

Love it. The timing is a bit shite though. I really wanted to finish some more stuff in the house before we do anything with the land but hey ho, the earlier these are poked into the ground (I’m sorry, “planted”) then the earlier we’ll have hedges and stuff.

In December, Tim was digging along the length of the kitchen waste pipe to see if it had collapsed or something further down because it was constantly blocking. And found a large jar with an actual snake in it!

Pretty gross, right? Tim poured it out onto the grass and the sound it made as it slid out made me actually retch. I have a photo of it laying there in all its pink grossness but I don’t know how to grey the photo unless you want to see it for some reason and click on it. Tim’s busy at the moment so I don’t want to ask him how to do that. So if you don’t want to see the photo, don’t scroll down.

Seriously, it’s nasty

I’ll add another paragraph in case the photo is still on your screen..

Hummm, hmmm, HMMMMMmore gaps for you.

Oh I can give you an innocuous photo to really spread the page out

Ok. Maybe that’s enough space. I’ll post the snake now. I’ll try not to look at it while I do that

It would be nice to have a room finished to take photos of “tadaaaaa” but I suspect it will be a while before a whole room is wholly done. So here’s a couple of pictures of the done bits of the tiling around the window and range.

The ceiling is bare plywood holding up insulation fluff so we left a line of tiles out along the ceiling line, which you can just see in the dark top right of the photo below. There are a few things left to complete in the kitchen.. remaining tiles, ceiling, lights above the sink and a few minor-ish things like skirting and waiting for the electrician to install the infrared panel. But even with that, the kitchen is miles nicer than any other room in the house, and with the view from the window it makes cleaning dishes almost a treat. Almost. A bit.

Definitely a lot more comfortable with tiling, but I suspect I make the task of adding caulk a lot more sticky than strictly necessary. I think I’ll be buying a tool for it before I do it again instead of using my hands.

We haven’t made a post since November, but we have been doing things. Just nothing to completion, everything lately has been piecemeal. We had the windows fitted in December – during a week of -8C temperatures which was.. unpleasant. Our electricity bill went up to €800 for December to warm up the frozen house once they’d left. But the windows are great. Triple glazing, much less windy in the house now. I was looking forward to taking pictures to share here but they didn’t have the right panes for the front windows so that’s been left unfinished. I’d rather wait to take photos until we have those in. I built a frame for one of the kitchen windows though. Tim had a specific idea in mind and I think I did ok!

He wanted a slightly used and dented look so I sanded some distress into it. I’m proud of it, especially because you can’t tell how wonky the window was originally. I filled in the wonks beforehand as much as I could with sand, cement, a wire frame, a spirit level and sore knees.

We had a new well dug in November and that was left chugging away for a month, leaving silt that it brought up all over the place. The water runs clear now and this week they connected it to the house!

It’s drinkable but very high in calcium so we will be adding a machine to help that. It’s interesting that the well that’s about 10m away, though shallower hardly has any calcium! I bought the final lot of bottled drinking water this week..that was €13 a week and a ton of plastic we’re happy to not do anymore.

We couldn’t get to replacing the kitchen roof until after winter, so we made the decision to fill the rafters and put up a temporary ceiling to try to mitigate heat loss – should be a bit warmer once the windows are done! 🤞

Nice to have a bit of light over the stove now… Just need to drill a hole in the back wall to install the ducting 💪☺️

We have this lean-to with a not-exactly-structurally-sound steel roof on it that was deemed the best spot to drill our new well. It obviously needs some demolition and cleanup work so I grabbed my trusty crowbar and sledgehammer and got to work today.

I won’t lie… I hit a lot of walls, both figuratively and literally, most commonly in the form of stubborn 3ft long nails (at least they felt that long!), clearly designed to make future roof removers absolutely miserable.

But! I got it done and the well drillers are on their way soon(ish) – good things 💪😊👍

Oh my god, was I spent by this point… That last beam had some super stubborn nails in them that I just couldn’t pry out to remove the cladding… I ended up smash-cutting a hole around each nail with the end of the crowbar just to clear the metal sheets out.

Now just to clear out the rest of the log rafters and clean the rubbish out and the well can be drilled! 👍👍

And a new rimlock with a wooden beehive knob for my bedroom door- gorgeous! And certainly better than the sharp splintery stick shoved through a hole that I was previously using! 😅