October 23rd 2019

[H] Today we have a new home!

Not really, it's just going to be our base on site, providing us with cooking facilities, a fridge, hot & cold running water, toilet, site office and somewhere warm and dry to escape to - at least it will hopefully provide all that once we've fixed all the things that currently don't work! We drove down to Leeds yesterday to visit a couple of used caravan dealers who seemed to have quite a few in our price bracket (less than £2,000). And we drove back late last night towing a 1999 Abi Award Morningstar. It was "sold as seen" and does need some work, but Malcolm's good at fixing things.

October 20th 2019

[H] Over the last few months we have gradually been picking out the larger rocks from around the plot and piling them all up along our boundary with next door. The plan is to use them to build a new dry stone wall to replace the old post and wire fence. We reckoned we had about 10 tonnes and it seemed like an awful lot of rock to us. The stone waller, David, came to have a look and didn't seem to think much of our "big" pile of rocks. The next thing we know a local farmer has dumped 30 tonnes of enormous boulders on our drive! We'd prepared the ground ready by scraping off the turf and David then set about building our wall. It's now about two thirds up, looking very substantial and that huge pile of rocks on the drive has all but vanished. Hope next door like it as much as we do.

October 12th 2019

[H] This weekend we finally moved out of Cragside. We are going to be staying in the next village about a mile away, near enough that we can keep a close eye on things but far enough away that we can have a break from the building site when we need to. We had considered (very briefly!) living in a caravan on site, and then the idea of a mobile home on site seemed an option for a while. But we know this project is going to take us years rather than months (as we'll be doing a lot of it ourselves) so in the end we decided it was important to have somewhere more comfortable and permanent to live and have all our stuff.

We hired a van for the weekend and Christopher (Malcolm's son) and his fiancee Rachel came up from Bristol to help. We've got some rather heavy bits of furniture and lots of stairs to get them up and we couldn't have done it on our own. The heaviest pieces needed the four of us to lift, two on either side using rolled up dustsheets as slings. And there seemed to be hundreds of boxes. We were all knackered by the end of the day and poor Christopher and Rachel have got to drive back to Bristol tomorrow.