Tag: eco
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Fiddly and annoying
It’s been a long time since I last posted – that’s largely because it’s been a long time since we’ve been able to do a decent bit of DIY. Between our holiday to Norway, friends weddings and a few other commitments, we’ve barely had time to pick up a hammer. Although it’s nice to do…
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DIY to the Max
Unfortunately for my cousin Max, his name makes a good pun – bad luck. However, it has felt like a good week for DIY, with his arrival not only giving us always welcome extra pairs of hands, but giving us a boost too. Max arrived on the Friday night and stayed till the following Friday.…
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Scuppered by gravity
I’ve had quite a long break from drystone walling, but after a particularly irritating teams meeting I got out in the garden to build some more, my own bit of meditation. It’s a bit of a unstable wall at the moment as I need to backfill in a number of the places, having built the…
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Van Post 2
Stage two of the van transformation was to insulate it. As someone that feels the cold this is a particularly important step for me. We’ve gone for slightly unusual insulation, as it’s actually the same stuff we insulated our house with. Chris found someone selling all the materials the contractors had left behind at a…
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Van Day 1
It’s certainly not a sensible thing to do, starting a van conversion when you still haven’t finished your house restoration, but this is exactly what we’re doing. In part we’re switching jobs because the IVF treatment starts in July so it’s possible next year we’ll be too busy with a baby to convert a van.…
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Two Years On
This Sunday marked 2 years since we got the keys for our new house, and 10 months since we moved in. We had hoped to have finished the inside by the 2 year mark, but everyone that’s ever watched Grand Designs will know you never make your deadlines. We started the week with some boring…
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A Little Sunshine
You’d think I’d be bored of building drystone walls, but if anything I wish we had more to build. When the new fence went in our neighbour’s gardener, who put in the fence, piled up some stones along the boundary to cover the gap at the base. We didn’t want a full wall here, as…
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Moving stones
This week I’ve been mostly moving stones around. I was pretty pleased with how the first wall came together. I’ve only done drystone walling once before, right back when I was a trainee, so I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make anything particularly solid. We didn’t want huge walls, just something to define…
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Puzzled
Filling, sanding and painting skirting is very boring, so I thought I’d take a break from this mind-numbing task to do something completely non-urgent, but more satisfying and fun. We have a number of piles of rocks in the garden, which need to be rebuilt into drystone walls. Drystone walls are better for wildlife than…
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Making space
With spring around the corner, I headed to my first volunteer day at the community garden, while Chris tried to tick off a big list of jobs. Firstly he put some finishing touches on the ventilation system, cutting down and connecting up the pipe in the spare bedroom, and cutting down the black tubes protruding…
Ruined 