November 17th - cladding on my jack

A short and mildly unsatisfying day on site. There was a blustery swirling wind blowing, the generator refused to start for a long time, a delivery of hay for the new horse arrived and had to be unloaded and I kept whacking my head on the same pointy corner of barge-board above the porch roof.

After giving up on the generator, putting its refusal to play the game down to a coked-up spark plug (for which I had no spanner), I decided to spend the day painting. I set up some bales in the shed, laid a few planks out and got cracking. Only then did it dawn on me that this approach would mean that all my off-cuts would be painted, and with Osmo retailing at over £15 / litre, this didn’t seem like a good idea. Instead I started painting the front wall, but got so buffeted and chilled by the wind that in desperation I had another bash at starting the gennie. This time I bypassed the ignition switch, and the wee beauty started first time. I think the damp must have corroded the contacts in the switch. I now have to stop it by pulling the HT lead off the spark plug.

With a cup of hot tea in me, I was much restored, and set about cutting and fitting more cladding. It was slow and a bit frustrating doing it on my tod, having to climb the ladders at each end of every board, and it was while fitting the planks above the porch and running a wire down for the porch light that I kept colliding with barge-board, eventually punching a hole in my scalp and giving myself a dull headache.

Around 3 p.m. Anna rang to say the cupboard was bare, and shortly afterwards I packed up (moving the saw indoors single-handed was a bit of a pantomime!) and headed home.

There’s only about an hour or two’s work left to do at the front with Melvin on Monday, after which we’ll move to the west end, which I started last week.

I’m toying with the idea of using waney-edge larch for the wall inside the verandah, which, as well as looking very rustic and groovy, will help to eek out the profiled spruce cladding and the Osmo, both of which I think might be quite tight. The forecast for the next few days doesn't look to clever, so we might even put the kitchen together if outdoor work is rained off.

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