A full complement on site again today, along with an assortment of kids of varying shapes, sizes and degrees of naughtiness.
By the time I arrived after a trip to Kelso to draw cash for the workers and pick up one or two things from the builders' merchants, Mal had knocked off half of the sarking of the porch, which is what I had decided was my job for the day. The tapers had sanded the stairwell and Mal had started on the stair components. We've splashed out on oak newels, spindles and hand-rails, and without all his nice sharp tools, which are already on their way back to Oz, he was struggling a bit with my blunt tools and very hard wood. I did, however, fit a new balde to the mitre-saw. The original blade has cut practically every stick of timber in the house, and the new one glides through oak like a cheese-wire through lard.
Melvin had been digging and backfilling the stormwater trenches, and happily moved to fitting the mortice lock in the oak front door when I took over from him. He was similarly hampered by a lack of sharp chisels, and the operation took him the rest of the day. I finished the day by building a scaffold under the waterfall window. The support timbers arrived mid-afternoon, after a cock-up in the ordering delayed them by over a month. Somehow it seems fitting that Mal's last day will be spent installing possibly the main feature on the front of the house - admittedly a task he's been gleefully avoiding for months!

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