Shelves to Devon

Our younger son and his wife have recently moved to South Hams in Devon to pursue their medical training, aiming to qualify as GPs in a couple of years' time.  On our first visit to their new house we identified an alcove which was asking quietly to be filled with book storage.  Obviously a job for some stock timber and tools back home, with the interesting question of how best to get it south.

The shelving timber came from my long-used Manchester timber-yard on the Subaru's roofbars.  Much clamping produced double-width pieces to form the lower storage section, fitted with mdf doors on hinges recycled from our old kitchen cabinets.  Suitably routed and glued together, the shelves entered the painting stage:

Just about this time, the weather changed and the temperature plummeted, leading to condensation forming on the underside of the barn roof and dripping onto the paintshop below.  Time to dig out a tarpaulin and rig a roof lining:

The next problem was transporting a highly flexible sheet of 6mm plywood for the backs of the units from Denbigh on a rainy day.  Sheet materials have a way of taking off from roofracks if you're not careful, so I took with me some battens and G clamps and bought a cheap sheet of hardboard as a rain cover.  It worked a treat:

I didn't fit the back to the upper shelf unit at this point as I needed the uprights to fit snugly around the head restraints on the front seats of the car - otherwise it would not have fitted in.  The lower storage unit went underneath it, with doors and loose shelves wrapped in copious amounts of cardboard.  Three hundred miles later, and with a little more construction time, here it was:

My customers were pleased, and I was glad to have the space back in the barn.  However, before I left it seemed a good idea to help to prune their pollarded willows, and with basket-making in mind I ended up bringing the Subaru back to North Wales wearing a dishevelled red wig (the car, not me):

So for now the willow is taking up the space in the barn which the shelves vacated.  More stock.  Sigh...

Long distance stock-iteming

The 'stock item' thing came about a few years ago as a result of grown-up children and their husbands/wives/partners using a visit home to sort out the odd problem - anything from a shot of windscreen washer fluid or a brake-light bulb for their car to a surplus fan heater to take home.  The facts that 1) I rarely, no, never dispose of anything I can imagine a use for, 2) I merged households many moons ago when I got married and kept the 'spare' kettle, cutlery, etc, 3) I have sadly cleared the homes of a number of deceased relatives, and 4) I  am not short of storage space in outbuildings here - all these mean that I have a lot of stuff which I am happy to distribute around the family if someone has a need for it.

Just recently I seem, accidentally as it were, to have introduced a mobile stock distribution service. A quick trip to Oxford was organised to avoid daughter and son-in-law incurring silly bills for the replacement of a couple of roof slates and the planing of a misfitting door.  It was a slight disadvantage that this necessitated transporting a full set of ladders, but the sausage casserole was a worthy reward.  While there we noticed that an electrical switch was on its metaphorical last legs so back at home I dipped into the appropriate box and popped one in the post to them.

Then, last week, we hurtled off to south Devon for a first visit to the new home of younger son and daughter-in-law who last month moved from rented accommodation to a very fine converted barn.  Into our car went their winter wheels/tyres previously stored in our barn and a heavy oak table they bought on Ebay months ago in anticipation of their move (we had kindly collected this for them from the seller).  Also, a small tool kit and a pull-cord light for their bathroom.  Ten hours' driving in 2 days but great to see them and their house - and a very fine rib of beef for dinner!  And what a lot of space I have now to introduce some more stock.

A question of scale

Two projects involving stock items to report on - a mid-sleeper bed for my older grandson and a tweak of a crutch (a support crutch, that is) for my father-in-law.

During a recent visit, my son was following a mid-sleeper bed on Ebay.  If, like me at that point, you're not familiar with the term 'mid-sleeper', it's like a top bunk without a bottom one, a bed with long legs, offering play, work or storage space below.  Unfortunately the Ebay bed got away so I offered to make one. The project reminded me of the time about 25 years ago when I was making bunk beds for my son and his younger sister, and he begged me to make the top one (for him) first. Tricky.

I had to buy some timber and went as so often in the past to Imperial Timber in Whalley Range on one of my  Manchester trips.  The wood there isn't plastic-wrapped and tends to come in very long lengths challenging my roof rack capacity, but it's half the price of many other places.  My other favourite source of timber is a yard near home which cuts everything from felled trees and where they rather look down on planed softwood, which is all I needed this time.  Screws, glue and tools came from stock.

It's a luxury to have the space of the new barn to work in, and the bed quickly took shape.

John Lewis efficiently delivered a mattress and the whole lot went over to Manchester on the trailer on a blessedly fine day.  One happy grandson.

Last week Liz's parents came to stay in the cottage. Father-in-law is struggling now with mobility, and on a recent visit to France bought an arm crutch to support his walking.  Unfortunately he discovered that the open design of the armpiece led to him dropping the crutch if he wanted to let go temporarily with his hand in order, say, to open a door.  It seemed worth trying a modification, and one hacksawed soilpipe clip later we had a happy f-i-l.  A hot air gun moulded the plastic to the right shape, and a couple of nuts and bolts with spring washers held it firmly in place.  Cost - zero.

Goodbye to an Old Friend

When me moved to North Wales almost 7 years ago, we bought, along with the house and holiday cottage, a 1964 Fordson Super Dexta tractor and Amtex topper which the previous owners had used to cut the grass in the one-acre field.  We also inherited a finger-mower and lots of spares and maintenance kit for the tractor.

We (that is, I) really enjoyed having the tractor.  It was well used in the early days and has always been a great attraction for the children and children-at-heart of our family.  It has survived the last two cold winters, wrapped up in old quilts in the open-sided post-barn to prevent the block from freezing and cracking.  With just the occasional oil change, greasing and battery-charging, it never failed to start.

But the one-acre field has been developing.  From our second year here, we have been planting trees and hedges to divide the space into a number of different gardening spaces.  We have dug 5 large beds to grow flowers, fruit and vegetables.  This year we have had a large area devoted to annual meadow flowers and grasses.  So the tractor, with its towed 5-feet wide cutter, has become ever less useful, just not nimble enough to cut around and between all these elements.  Grass cutting is now done on a second-hand ride-on mower picked up on Ebay.

So when our trusty builder, Gareth, indicated an interest in buying the tractor to restore, we reluctantly agreed to say goodbye.  Although I am averse to de-stocking on this scale, it obviously made sense.  And now I have lots of space in the barn to think about!

So last weekend we said goodbye, and hope to see the Super Dexta again in its pomp at future agricultural shows.

Basket case

It's good to go back to school from time to time, to leave one's comfort zone, to meet an expert and try something new.  I signed up a while ago for one of many fascinating courses at the Woodland Skills Centre near our neighbouring village of Bodfari.  We are very fortunate to have this fantastic resource so close.

My two day course offered an introduction to willow basket making and the tutor was the hugely experienced and talented Mandy Coates - see her website here.

We have been growing a small amount of willow at the damper end of our field and I was curious to know whether this might ever provide a source for basket making.  In the event I was amazed how much material goes into quite a small basket, so we've since planted another hundred or so whips to give us a chance of harvesting our own material from next year onwards.

The weaving process was fascinating - and hard on the fingers and thumbs at first.  There's a relaxing, almost hypnotic, aspect to the regular ins and outs of the work, with an occasional abrupt awakening when you realise you've gone wrong.  However, all six of us ended up with surprisingly attractive and useful first-time baskets, thanks to Mandy's gentle and authoritative guidance.  Here's mine - now to fill it!

Water, water, every where

Today it has rained for hours and hours; thankfully now, early evening, it has stopped while there is still some light left in which to appreciate the washed world.

We think about water a lot here, and not just for gardening purposes.  Some years before we purchased this property, it was connected to a mains water supply.  But not directly, as the water pressure from Welsh Water was not sufficient to bring a decent supply all the way up the hill to us.  So, a quarter of a mile from our house in a neighbour's sloping field, 40 vertical metres below us, our pump-house nestles in the roots of an enormous oak tree.  Linked to the storage tank in our loft by some complicated electronics, a powerful pump moves water up from a holding tank as and when required.  At least, that's the theory.  It has been known to go wrong, but we have an excellent 'pump man' who comes to sort it out.  We do, however, feel that we pay three times for our water - once for the metered supply, twice for the electricity to pump it up to us, and thrice for the maintenance of the infrastructure.

So partly to save money, and partly because plants prefer non-chlorinated rainwater, we collect the water that falls from the sky.  When we arrived, we inherited a number of domestic-sized rainwater butts, and we have added to them - a total of ten at the last count, including one on a corner of the new barn:

We also inherited, at the back of the house, a non-domestic tank which holds 2500 litres, taking half the rain which falls on the house.  A long pipe leads from it under our drive to the kitchen garden, and (the tank being significantly higher) provides reasonable pressure for watering in the greenhouse.  This gave me the idea, when we started gardening in the field 5 years ago, of storing the rain water which falls on the 'stable' (the workshop/store).  I bought 2 IBCs, each of 1,000 litres, intending to build a platform to raise them to create some head.  Last month, I decided against the platform and bought instead a submersible pump.  The tanks are now in place, linked to share the modified guttering arrangement, and have taken in a total of 1500 litres in the last 30 hours or so.  Let's call the intervening 5 years the planning period.

We are hoping that this supply will go a long way to protecting us from drought when the scorching summer finally arrives.  Two more IBCs are on order to take the bulk of the water from the different roof elevations of the barn.  Four thousand litres should see us through.

It's finished (or very, very nearly)

So, here is the new two-part barn:

Very nearly finished, because the galvanised doors have to be painted juniper green at some point to match the cladding of the rest of the structure.  The lower pair are sliders and the higher pair side-hinged, and amazingly everything seems to work well despite the sloping site.  We now know that 80 tons of stone went into levelling the floors - it will be great to have our first level working sites, and under cover, too.

What a lot of stock items I'm going to be able to fit in!