Another from the archive waiting to be posted:

13 February 2015

 Yes it’s a great week to start building a house. Here is the image from the traffic camera at the head of Glencoe the morning after I arrived up at Cuil Bay on Sunday night. And all day Monday there was lashing rain, sleet, hail and winds at gale force.

Yesterday, the day that the worst weather hit, was the day scheduled for the arrival of the frame so I had rented a cottage in the area, gathered a few friends and relatives together and we planned to watch the frame going up. But it didn’t happen.

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At the very last minute the frame company said they couldn’t deliver to the schedule we’ve been working to since October. I called on the Wednesday to check all was OK for delivery Monday and it wasn’t. It was delayed. I couldn’t get a sensible schedule out of anyone and all seemed utter chaos in the office.

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‘I can’t give you a date until I have the drawings on my desk’
‘When will you have the drawings on your desk?’ said I.
‘No idea- ask technical’
‘Can you walk down the corridor to ask technical?’
‘No’

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I called technical
‘They have the drawings’, they said. 
‘They don’t think they have the drawings’
‘They do’
‘Can you walk down the corridor and tell them they have the drawings?’
‘No’

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In the end I needed to write to the Managing Director to sort it out (he was adept at avoiding my calls) And got a revised date a week delayed.

 
Here is my letter. 

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I might have been raging last week, while sorting out the mess, but now it seems like a relief. At least I had a few days to rearrange the contractors, scaffolding, and crane. Not a simple process but I am now getting used to it….

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But I still had a wee cottage in beautiful Duror booked, which I couldn’t cancell, and the time off work. This would be my chance to escape the chaos of home and work and spend a bit of time by myself organising house stuff without the thousands of distractions. A house-organising retreat. Me, my laptop and a cup of coffee.

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The cottage was a converted barn on a farm with three immense shire horses who spent the time I was there sheltering from the horrific conditions in the barn opposite. I looked out of the window at the horses but I didn’t go out. Not for the entire day.

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I’d packed very simple food, my laptop and piles of house paperwork. I spent the day arranging and organising things related to the house – bills, plans, quotes. When I called home from the stillness of the cottage the chaos of home was a bit of a shock. Perhaps I should do this more often.

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I met with Stuart the local Appin builder who had so efficiently and competently delivered the foundations and ground works to the stage of being ready for the frame. Nothing is a crisis to Stuart. Practically everything is a crisis to me. He arrived at the cottage in the torrential downpour from working on a site just down the road in Duror which was an epic mud bath- it looks like the builders will need sub-Aqua kit to lay the strip foundations.

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We chatted over an earl grey (‘no biscuit thanks’) as I tried to pursued him (again) to take on the next bit of work. We talked over the various bits of the work (me not knowing anything and fearing seeming even more ignorant than I actually am) with me saying all sorts of embarrassingly naive things and him nodding and saying ‘yes ahuh’. 

But he was, as ever, unmovable on the issue of building my house.
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Over that three day period of thrashing rain and gales I ventured out only to visit the electrician and the renewables compan, oh and I did visit the plot and saw the concrete slab and finished buried pipe work. But mainly I spent the two days retreating in my little cottage. It’s something I really think I should do more of.