Job Dunn :-)

Two full days of ‘proper work’ behind and I’m wrecked and it feels great, seriously, I’ve not worked like this since September when I first departed for South Shields. The two weeks ‘holiday’ I took at Christmas was one long shower and I spent most of that in Lachie’s digger or on his dumper wrapped up in oilskins. Wednesday and Thursday however have just been like the ‘old days’ when I worked ‘week on week off’, the days when I used to return to the MV Loch Striven for a rest

Working last weekend on the Finlaggan, plus a few days that I’m owed for travelling to South Shields and back has given me a little more time than the all too short weekend at home. I know, I know, most people only get the weekend off so I shouldn’t complain, but I’ve kind of geared my life around it these last ten years and work on the croft has been suffering this past eight months. Not to mention work on  the new house and ‘Old Girl’, who’s not had a wash since Christmas  

The ‘Rolls Royce’ of windows

It could not have worked out better, the long dry spell seems set to continue and I arrived home on Tuesday to a voicemail from Mark Dunn of Dunn Homes http://www.dunnhomes.co.uk/ to say he was coming to fit our Internorm windows

 

Triple glazed with U value of .60W/m2K for the pane and .80W/2K for the whole window including the wood, foam and aluminium clad frame these are serious windows for a serious climate. Sure I could have got some for a third of the cost in UPVC but I’ve got good UPVC ones in this house and whilst they’re perfectly functional I don’t actually like them. Wood I could have got for around half the price but then I’d probably be replacing the weather ones in 15 years or even less if I didn’t paint them regular. Whatever window I’d have bought it wouldn’t have been as thermally efficient as these  and they certainly wouldn’t have been as quiet Certainly your never going to save the cost difference between 2g and 3g in your heating bills in less than 20 years but with us it’s not about the money. We’re thinking of our retirement and every watt saved is less electricity to make or wood to cut, we are hoping that our house will actually be totally powered and heated by the wind, sun and water, the biomass boiler being for emergencies

 

 

I know, I sound like a window salesman but they are a work of art, beautifully engineered, triple sealed and I feel like a ‘dog with two d***s’

 

Fencing on rock

My first serious croft related job was moving a fence, a fence that I’d had professionally fitted some years ago and never been truly happy with. In all fairness to the chap who did it the correct route for it was over solid rock and would have been far more expensive. Anyway over the last year or two, no doubt as result of several droughts the fence has lifted and the we pigs can just charge right under it, so rather than just bodge it up I decided to  move the whole fence to where it should have been in the first place.

 

 

After much prodding with a 6” long crow bar I found a spot for the strainer post that would get it in around 18", no where near enough on its own but I planned to drill and pin the rock behind it and put in wire stays. If you can get the strainer post solid enough and really tighten up the wire then the actual fence posts don’t need to be that deep. Just as well because I’d barely enough soil to loose the point of the stob.

 

Getting momentarily distracted when Mark and Kevin arrived with 700kg of windows in their two white vans at 12:30

 

 

They’d left the east coast at 5:00am but wasted no time and got ‘stuck in’ straight away

and the first two windows were in much quicker than it took me to find a strainer post

 

In fact, I couldn’t find one

 

so had to resort to ‘desperate measures’ and chop a telegraph pole Unfortunately it was quite a way from home so I had to ‘improvise’ luckily the road was quiet

 

Once the post was vertical the hole is filled in with rocks and tamped down, all the time shaking the strainer to settle it the tamping  some more until it’s solid.

 

That done I drilled and pinned the rock and tensioned it with wire, not too tight yet, until I’d done the one at the other end too.

 

With Molly, Dude and the pigs helping it took much longer than it should have

 

However Mark and Kevin made sterling progress, working right through until 20:00 when they finally came in for dinner having got all 20 windows fitted and just two or three hours finishing off to do. This was due in no small part to Lachie, Donald and Angus’s fine job of putting up the kit. Both Mark and Kevin commented on the quality of their work Apparently is not uncommon to arrive at a job like this and spend hours squaring things up and hacking away at wood.

 

After polishing of one of the wife’s excellent offerings and putting the world to rights over a couple of beers we all turned in, me setting the alarm for 6:30 so as I could have breakfast ready for ‘the workers’ at 7:00.

Sure enough, they were ‘up and at it’ bright and early and by 10:20 the windows were ‘Job Dunn’

 

 

 

Even the dog was impressed

 

 

That will be the view from the ‘hen lady’s’ new packing station

Back to the rock

After admiring our views and deciding to come back later with a bottle of wine and watch the sun go down through the new windows we got back on the the fence.

 

A wooden stay would assist in enabling me to get the wires seriously tensioned and that plank on the bottom which was screwed to a nearby tree would prevent the post from twisting under the tremendous strain. I planned to put extra high tensile wire on and really get the wires ‘singing’

    

As you can see there’s just a couple of inches of soil and I’m drilling the rock and putting extra wires in to hold the post down under tension.

 

 

Still nowhere near finished, but you’ve got to bear in mind that I’m carefully dismantling the old fence and reusing it, which is almost as fiddly as putting the new one up.