Six Skills for Scottish Skiing

Posted on January 18, 2015 by nager

We’re just back from a short ski tour on Ben Lawers and it set me to contemplating what a different beast Scottish skiing is from its more refined Alpine sibling. Especially when watching Swiss hubby, so stylish and wiggly on a Swiss slope, pick his way precariously down the hill. We had been planning to park at the Ben Lawers car park but, as a local farmer told us as we were stuck in his driveway for half an hour figuring out how to put on our snow-chains, they don’t clear the road since a snow plough got stuck one year and could only be retrieved six weeks later.

Instead, we parked near the farmers house (once we had got the snow chains on and stopped blocking the man’s drive) and skied up a farm track onto the hill via the sub-arctic mini forest of Ben Lawers National Nature Reserve on the way – spotting my largest ever group of Black grouse as we ascended.

So here are my six essential skills for Scottish skiing.

1. Negociating bracken fields.
There are few Scottish hillsides without thickets of dead bracken waiting to snag your ski tip and offering a miriad opportunities to dislocate your knee. At times like this style goes out the window in the interests of self-preservation.

2. Skiing with a raging tailwind.
The classic Scottish combo of skiing down with a gale force wind at your rear and the accompanying wind-scoured ice interspersed with pockets of deep, drifted powder snow means snow plough is your friend. It also means you’ll get a chance to use those spare gloves stashed in your rucksac when your main pair blow away.

3. Negotiating hidden obstacles.
There won’t be any base to the snow so under every frosty countour is an obstacle waiting to snag your ski while you travel forward with surprising momentum hoping your ski comes off before your knee is wrenched off.

4. River crossing:
Skis in one hand Poles in the other. Hop from snow covered rock to icy boulder. Simple.

5. Skiing farm tracks.
Often the best way up onto the open hill and back. But can have stones close to the surface – keep skis level, skim over those stones, imagine floating across them. Yes you can ski right over the muddy cow footprints and tractor tracks but DONT BREAK or your skis will be scratched to smithereens.

6. Know your snow.
As an instructor advised a friend of mine doing a ski course in the Cairngorms ‘There are four types of snow’.

There is White Snow – the stuff we all know and love but which can be few and far between on Scottish slopes. There’s Grey Snow: you can ski on this but be careful, it’s slippery. There’s Brown Snow – that’s heather – also fine to ski on but can slow you down suddenly so watch out. And finally there’s Black Snow; don’t ski on that, it’s rock and it will hurt your skis.

So with these wise words and an entreaty to carry pretty much everything you might need for a week in the wilderness on your back (even just for a day out at Glen Coe Resort) I leave you. As another friend suggested, Scottish skiing needs a rebrand, “Calling it skiing just misleads people who’ve been to the Alps – they should call it ‘extreme Scottish snow-sports’.”

The Erection is in sight

Posted on January 14, 2015 by nager

Tee hee hee! So much adolescent humour to be had around arranging the construction of a timber kit.

So the good news is that we are getting there. Part one ‘subterranean works, concrete and pipes’ is nearly complete and part two ‘The Erection’ is about to begin.

We have a date for delivery (23rd February) and it’s all starting to come together. The date’s been put back a coupes of times though – I don’t want you to think this is going smoothly…

Firstly back in August we had a date for delivery in September. But we couldn’t start on the build before we had a building warrant and we couldn’t apply for a building warrant before we had the calculations from The timber frame company engineers.

Building control can’t be gained in a month, even once you get all the paperwork done

……. so we had to put back the erection.

Secondly you can’t erect a frame without a foundation and we couldn’t build the foundation without a plan from the timber kit company. The architects had drawn a foundation plan but The kit company make a specific plan for our builder to work to. The plan maker couldn’t make the plan until the engineers had done the calculations and the builder couldn’t build until he had the plan.

And building foundations can take some time to build

…… so we had to put back the erection.

Thirdly, I noticed (which I should have noticed before) a BT phone line right across the plot. It was only when I saw it stretched over the foundations, right above where our dining table and kitchen work top would be, that I realised just how in the way it was.

I called BT OpenReach about getting it moved.

Timescales? ‘Within 25 working days we’ll have someone out to you.’
‘Oh. Five weeks? But then it will be all done?’
‘No that’s just the surveyor, once he’s done the report it’s up to 90 working days to get the work done.’
‘You mean it could take up to five months to get this line moved?’

…..So we had to put back the erection

At this point Scotframe got in touch. They wanted me to take delivery of the windows for the house. Delivery where? To our barren windswept building site with diggers and holes in the ground? The vast and valuable, probably-most-expensive-component-of-the-house windows?

It seemed that they had ordered the windows right at the start of the process back in August: Before they had made the engineering calculations to allow us to apply for a building warrant to put in those self-same windows, before they had drawn the foundation plan so we could start building them.

I started by looking for possibilities of places they could go. However the space our neighbour the farmer had in his barn wouldn’t allow a forklift in to deliver them. I looked into building our shed/bike storage early but it would have got in the way of the kit erection. Then I thought ‘this is silly, they took delivery of the windows months before it would have been possible to make the kit (even without the BT line issue)’. And miraculously the Timber kit company found somewhere to hold onto them until now.

I think we are finally on track though. But I suppose it will be wise not to speak to soon.

I NEED a crane

Posted on January 14, 2015 by nager

I’ve never needed a crane before and I don’t think I’ll ever need one again but I need one more than anything else just now.

With this project turning proper self-build with me as defacto project manager (or, as I tend to call it, chaos manger) I have needed to set my hand to such things as getting cranes and scaffolding. I thought this would be utterly straightforward. But I am gradually learning that almost nothing is.

I’ve got a date that the frame arrives. 23 February. 8am. It rolls off the factory floor and off on a huge lorry to Lochaber. I need to have a crane ready and waiting for it at 730am and a full setup of scaffolding built and then, over the next three-four days, the building goes up. Doors, windows and all.

I sought out some names to contact to get them booked in. ‘Be patient with scaffolding guys’ was the advice, ‘they’ve been hit in the head by too many bits of metal’….

Easy peasy. I’ve got two quotes coming from scaffolding companies (or at least I should have a second one coming but their email address is nowhere to be found on the web and the one he gave me over the phone doesn’t work).

Then I called the crane company but all their cranes are booked out for a school build until March. Eeeek. And where are there any other cranes? Oban. Well at least that’s not too far away. What if they are busy? That will be the central belt then. Oh.

I have taken to calling the crane folks on a daily basis -it’s joined the morning routine- kids up, twitter, breakfast with Radio 4, packed lunches, bike lights? Check. Helmet? Check. Ten layers of clothing? Check. Call the crane people? Check.

At least they have me on the radar. But they have only one crane driver and according to an unattributable source ‘a crane out of the Burrell collection’. But let me tell you, a crane out of the Burrell collection is better than no crane at all and I am going to keep on calling.

PostScript: this morning I called and it was all sorted out. A crane and a crane driver £50 an hour is mine from 730am on 23rd February. Phew.

And because I really am more comfortable with birds than machinery here’s a picture of a real crane

craneimage

We have a Building warrant at last!

Posted on January 14, 2015 by nager

At last, the final piece of paper work has gone in and we now have a building warrant.

I can barely contain my joy. But I am also rather relieved. I had absolutely no idea it could possibly take this long. We were just awaiting the engineers final plans and it was finalized last week.

The build can’t start without the fabled building warrant so it’s pretty good that I had to put back the delivery of the kit months in case I couldn’t get the phone line moved and the. Missed the production slot so couldn’t move it back before Christmas again …

Moral of story – things take at least 20 times as long as you can imagine would be possible. But it feels good when they at last start to happen.

How many engineers does one project really need?

Posted on January 12, 2015 by nager

I thought I just had one engineering firm on this project.

I know they are my engineers because they send me bills. And they send me reports and stuff. They came by at the very beginning and charged me loads of money to peer down some pits that Ronnie the local digger-driver had dug (They did more than that actually – they also made a lovely detailed contour map of the plot and told me about the water table and where the rock was)

It was really only this week that I discovered that there are actually three lots of engineers working in my project.

I need to write this blog if only to get my head around what happened on Friday.

We are in the final stages of getting a building warrant for the upper building (we’ve had the warrant for the foundations for ages and they are, in fact nearly built) and the SER certificate from the engineer was the final thing we needed. On Friday all the documents came through but there was an extra foundation wall or two in the diagram from what we are in the process of building. This, as you can imagine, is not a negligible difference.
Look here the foundation walls as we have them

…and here’s the Scotframe Diagram the builder was working to …. Identical

….and here’s the final ‘thank-goodness-it-wasn’t’ Engineer’s diagram that arrived on Friday

This probably should have created general panic from me but this came on one of my working days, which contain enough panic and chaos of their own. I’ve managed to compartmentalize life and work so one doesn’t bother the other too much during the 9-5pm, so, instead, I felt a rather distant unease, as if viewing the horror from a far-away planet.

In fact we’d been through something like this before – underneath that lovely screed in the part-finished foundations photo is a beautiful strip foundation. (But that’s another blog…)

It turned out there are engineers working for the timber kit company and still more engineers contracted by the timber kit company. And these engineers don’t seem to talk to our engineers.

Fortunately the architects flagged up the discrepancy to me and I pointed out that our architects could have been working from an earlier plan. With much difficulty we got hold of the various engineers and got things sorted. Or rather the archticted did, I don’t really know what happened. All I know is now that the engineers from the timber frame company sent back some annotated drawings and all is now well with the foundation plan as we have it. Well until the next thing goes wrong anyway.

Self-Build Insurance

Posted on January 12, 2015 by nager

I suppose it might have been an idea to get site insurance before we had the foundations more or less complete.

We’ve have third party liability insurance on the plot since the beginning (a extension from an existing policy that we have for a woodland – it’s miles away but it cost us no extra to have the plot on the policy) so I think I had that box ticked in my mind and thought no more about it.

It was only when I was trying to work through the box-ticking exercise , which is seeing if you qualify for an interest free loan to install renewables, that my mind was tweaked: having self-build insurance was one of the ways to prove that you were a self-builder to enable you to get the grant.

‘Oh. Self Build insurance? Ah. Better get some’

So I spent the morning in the phone to various companies. Mostly to sales folks
Them ‘What kind of heating will the house have”
Me ‘air source heat pump’
Them ‘can you explain?’ (I do my best but perhaps go too far into the idea of a reverse fridge and the principles of squeezing a gas to make it hotter and confuse her)
‘Well I’ve never come across that before’ she said at last.

Another hadn’t heard of SIPs (structured insulated panels and the kind of construction we are going for with the kit house). She had it down as ‘unconventional construction’ and said that they probably wouldn’t be able to insure us (later when I sent accompanying documentation she did send a quote)

But one company, BuildCare, put me straight through to a reassuringly expert sounding man rather than going straight into 20 minutes of asking my personal details. I am not sure whether it was his gruff North of Aberdeen accent but I imagined he was straight off a constitution site and seemed to understand my totally ameteurish descriptions of everything and translated it into builder-speak for the forms.

That all seemed so simple and now I have a couple of quotes (two people I was dealing with – seemingly from different companies – Zurich and SelfBuild appeared to work at the same company and worked at neighbouring desks) so much for looking about for the best price..

Now I have reams of forms to fill in and I seem to have to register as a developer. Some questions seem
A bit hard – my project manager? Eeeek. Contracts? Eeeeek eeek.

One of the questions I was asked by every insurance brokers on the phone comes into stark contrast ‘Will you be selling the house once you have built it?’ …. Eh? ‘Surely no one goes through this just so they can sell it?’