Welsh cakes, woodburner and windows

Well, guess what . . . . I have actually had three whole days off this week!  Can you believe it.  I think this is the first time this year on my new M & S contract (under which I should in theory have four days off) that I have actually had more than two.  I kept expecting to be asked to go in, but it didn't happen until my first day off when they rang to see if I'd work today.  By then though we'd got our schedule organised and so I politely declined.  So, I just have to go in tomorrow (wearing pink because of their valentines promotions!) and then I'm off for a whole week!

So, what have we got done?  We have finally got all the windows done, that's what.  We collected the new glass on Monday morning - all lovely this time thank goodness.  First we did the little window which still looks endearingly wonky and, yes, that strange blackbird has been to investigate it, but still seems to prefer fluttering at the oak room windows.  You can see it's poo on the triangle window ledge!

The opening door in the lounge and the fire escape door in the end bedroom are also done with bolts and locks fitted.  Unfortunately, it hasn't done much to make those rooms cosy because there are still some pretty large gaps round the frame.  Ironically, we need some warmer weather to be able to point them in with lime mortar, then we can squirt expanding foam in and that should all make a difference.  It has been extremely chilly and dank for the last few days - freezing fog.  I think we've got away lightly on the snow front though compared to the rest of the country - we only had about an inch that lasted for about a day.

So, with the windows as far on as we can get them for now, we have moved onto insulation.  We raced ahead with the first layer in the roof of the end bedroom.  That's the easy one, just 1" thick which goes between the rafters leaving a gap between that and the breather membrane under the slates so condensation can escape.  I was in the lounge on cutting duties and Bob was up the scaffold tower popping them into place and calling down the next measurement - a tried and tested system that works quite efficiently.  The next layer goes immediately under that and is 3" thick and will need a bit of shaping to make it snug against the purlin.  If it's not a tight fit, it will also need screwing itno place, so that won't be quite so easy to do.  Then we will have to attach some battens so we have something to attach the plasterboard to.  You just can't get plasterboard screws long enough to get a good fixing through that sort of thickness and we found by trial and error in our bedroom that this was the best way.  We will probably put another 1" of insulation between the battens seeing as there will be a gap doing nothing, so with all that, I don't think we'll lose much heat through the roof!

We have to be careful what order we insulate that room in so that we can get to the bits we need and also so there are no gaps.  So, we've finished the first roof layer and we've started on the walls.  This room had to be tanked as it's built into the hill and so we put metal studwork up which is only fixed top and bottom so doesn't pierce the tanking.  The insulation fits into the H-shaped studwork and it is easier to do that before you screw the studwork together and so needs to be done before the thick roof insulation or we wouldn't be able to screw the top together.  Annoyingly, the insultaion is about 2mm thicker than the recess in the studwork.  I tried just bashing along the edge of the insulation with a mallet to squash it, but it didn't really work, so we have to shave a bit off each edge to fit it which is a bit of a pain.

We had a bit of a slow start this morning.  Firstly we had to go in the 'bat loft' and design a new (much smaller) loft for the little creatures that have never actually shown any interest in the huge luxury living space we originally provided for them.  This means we can reclaim the space up there and have a sort of mezzanine storage/slobbing out area (called a crog loft in Welsh houses).  I also had a quick look through the boxes of Laura's clothes which are stored up there to find something pink to wear to work tomorrow.  Then down to the kitchen where one of the joints in the woodburner flue had dropped just after we lit it last night.  Obviously we couldn't do anything about it immediatley (a little warm!), so that was priority this morning.  The plumber had just joined the pieces of flue with heatproof silicone stuff, but it obviously didn't work too well, so we needed to get some self-tapping screws to do the job a bit more securely, so another trip into town (I made cheese scones for lunch while Bob did that).  We are also on cat feeding duties for Bill, so by the time we'd done that and checked that his ground source heat pump/underfloor heating was behaving it was lunchtime!

We have had a little visitor at night recently which nibbled a potato and some pasta stored in the utility room.  So we shut the door to the utility at night and put a piece of chocolate on the floor which didn't get eaten, but the one in the hall did.  So we assume it can't get in the utility with the door shut.  We hadn't heard anything from it for a few nights and the chocolate in the hall didn't disappear.  Last night though, we were watching TV and heard a little scrabbling noise from a carrier bag by the fireplace so in a co-ordinated movement, I switched the light on as Bob snatched the carrier and the little crittur scurried behind the fridge.  With a torch we could see it's silouette behind there with twitching ears (it actually looked quite cute) before it made a dash for the fireplace and disappeared.  As I said before, replacing the tiles round the fireplace is a job for when we clear that corner to do the stairs and part of that will be patching up the back of the fireplace.  Currently there are lots of broken bits and holes and a cunning little mouse would easily find a way through the unpointed wall in the lounge to the fireplace in the kitchen.  So, we haven't really got much choice but to put a trap down.  I just hope I'm not the first down the ladder to find it one morning!

We have made tea on or in the woodburner every night for more than a week which is quite a good feeling!  I even had a go at making welsh cakes on it last week.  They actually burned a bit, so I did the rest in a frying pan on the cooker - they also burned a bit, so it wasn't the woodburner's fault at all.  I guess because they have sugar in they go from not cooked to burnt in the blink of an eye.  They were good though and I'll definitely give them another go some time.