Arrived on site a few minutes after Mal, who was sitting disconsolately in the van with Boo, looking out at the rain. Melvin had already been, collected the mixer and legged it before we could persuade him to stay. Not that staying was particularly high on Mal’s list, or mine. We came very close to aborting the day because of the weather – the first time it had really affected Mal in this way, but after a cuppa we girded up our loins and got stuck in.
Still waiting for the big first-floor joists from Doves, but still found plenty to keep us busy. Worked out the stairwell details and built the snug wall, finished the wall plate and fitted the shorter joists above the snug.
A Doves lorry turned up with the replacements for yesterday’s wrongly sized joists, and shortly a load of chipboard flooring arrived from Rembrand. When I went to scrounge a forklift from Neil I found him kneeling beside a 10-minute-old calf who’d had part of its innards pulled out through its navel by its mother pulling on the umbilical. Neil gently fed them back up the tube (like sausage-meat in a skin) and put a tight rubber ring around it to contain it all, and left it to stitch later. Enlightening insight into one of the lesser-known tasks of a beef farmer.
Right at the end of the day the scaffold arrived, jumbled in a disordered heap in the back of a truck. It had to be unloaded piece-by-piece, and we had a line of ant-like children ferrying the frames down to the plot-side.
I noticed with alarm that some of the timbers seem to be starting to rot in the filthy wet weather they’ve been sitting in for the last fortnight. Surely it has to stop sometime!
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| First floor 060707 |
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