Last week, after visiting the house, I got all gushy thinking that, at long last, the build is over and I may never see the joiners again. I even called the house phone to express my undying thanks to a rather embarrassed joiner in case I didn’t get another chance. This week that appears to have been an over-optimistic and premature farewell. 
Progress has undoubtedly been made and it feels that I may be gaining territory from the builders. The carpets are in, I’ve hoovered up new carpet fluff, laid down my sleeping bag and turned on the MVHR again (apparently I’m not supposed to have it on if there is loads of dust). It’s starting to feel that upstairs is nearly my territory. 

  The skirting is more-or-less all on, the painting more-or-less all done, and yet there still seem to be countless things that aren’t quite done yet. Downstairs everything is still covered with sheets and cardboard and a layer of dust and doesn’t really feel ‘mine’ yet. I fried my vulture-shelf salmon fish cakes with the feeling that I was cooking in someone else’s kitchen, gingerly lifting the cardboard off the cooker to use it and putting it back afterwards. I wasn’t expecting the kitchen sink to be functioning, but it was, and the shower door was on at last* and complete. Joy Joy. I might go and have a bath, I thought. 

 I’ve been looking forward to having a bath in the new house for ages. Our current house in Glasgow, where we’ve lived for well over a decade, has the coldest bathroom I’ve ever been in, apart from perhaps the shower block at the campsite we frequent in Arisaig. 

  It also has a rather unreliable hot water supply since eight years ago I inadvisably installed a combination of solar hot water panels and a back boiler on a wood burning stove as the main ways to heat it. You can have as many hot baths as you like when it’s a blazing summer day but, when you would actually like to luxuriate in a warm bath, after a cold cycle home in the pouring rain, for example, the water is disappointingly tepid.  

However my desire not to clean the bathroom that would inevitably be messed up almost immediately by some other work that needed doing overcame my desire for a bath and decided to use the gannet shower instead.

  Two 1.5 m high gannets skypointing, printed onto dibond. I am not tilings biggest fan (perhaps due to the speed mould grows in my damp, frigid, bathroom) as you may have gathered so I thought about alternatives. I can’t think of anything worse than plastic faux marble shower panels of the type you get in youth hostels, ones you press and they dent then bounce back. There are probably all sorts of other shower panels you can get these days but I loose the will to live almost immediately on entering any kind of bathroom shop or showroom so I never really got past seeing a few I absolutely loathed. 

In the end I found inspiration in my job working for RSPB Scotland. I cover all the people side of their work including interpretation and visitor experience and we make most of our outdoor interpretation panels from dibond. If it stands up to 10 years in a damp woodland at Loch Lomond with one of the highest rainfalls in Britain, why wouldn’t it work in a shower?

I started looking for photos. First landscape ones (though the clues in the name there – I needed a very vertical image and landscapes tend towards the horizontal) a fabulous photographer friend sent me a few images I could use, but all either didn’t have a strong vertical aspect or weren’t high enough resolution. 

  It was about this time we set upon a name for the house. We both would have loved Balnagowan, the name of the island just off Cuil bay, a gull colony, which makes it special as my PhD was on gulls and husband still studies them. However that name was taken. I fixed upon the next island down, Shuna. The kids wanted the name of a bird. Their choice, Curlew Cottage or something of that ilk. Husband was lobbying for something related to gulls (Larus? Herring Gull House?) We had reached an impasse. 

Suddenly I came up with the answer- Sula – the old Latin name for gannets and also the old Norse name (and current Icelandic name as we found out from friends over Christmas). Despite saying lesser black back gull is my favourite bird, out out of loyalty, it is really the gannet, the most elegant, beautiful, graceful bird in the world. See blogs from my summer visit to Ailsa. 

It just worked. Everyone agreed. And the subject matter for the shower panel was simultaneously decided. I remembered husband had a talented wildlife photographer turned PhD student in his research group and so I asked whether he had any photos of gannets. And he did, which he generously let me use. And the rest is history. We’ll have to see how the dibond stands up to the rigors of being a shower panel. But in going to start with its first initiation and we’ll see how we get on. 

* We’d been awaiting replacement hinges for the shower, which is why it took a while to get the shower screen up.  I’d ordered a left hand door thinking it opened from the left, when it actually meant that the hinges were in the left. ‘No problem’ thought I, I’ll just swap the hinges. The whole shower is identical for left and right opening, it’s just installed upside down. The only bits that’s different are the hinges. I called Victoria Plum. ‘No we can’t just send the hinges up’ said the woman in the all centre ‘we’d need to replace the whole shower screen.’

‘But it’s only the hinges I need’

‘We don’t stock the hinges seperately’

‘The whole shower screen is installed already, what would happen is you would send the screen from the south of england to the north of scotland, I would take out the hinges, pop the old hinges back in and send the whole thing back  down south again.’

‘Yes’

‘So can’t someone in your warehouse just take the hinges out and send them?’

‘No’

I asked the same thing in a couple more ways and got nowhere, she evidently didn’t have the power to change anything, nor would she put me on the phone to anyone who could. 
Exasperated I took to Twitter. And within seconds Victoria Plum tweeted me to let me know that they had called the warehouse and there were some spare hinges and that they would send them up to me. Free of charge.   

Another small victory.