A Castle in the Sky

In March 2013, after years of talking about it we eventually sell up and move out of the city with our 2 year old, Gracie. We both grew up in the countryside and this is what we want for our daughter. So we swap a 2 bed flat in London for a small country pile on the west coast of Scotland that needs a lot of work. I've done a bit of interior design and my partner, Ed has a good knowledge of the outdoors – but we're on a tight budget and we've both got a lot to learn. It's a life time's project and this is a record of our adventure…

Category Archives: moving


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Apples apples everywhere…(Aug 31)

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The old orchard in the walled garden (half a dozens trees) has produced hundreds of apples despite the fact that none of the trees have been pruned for years.   They are almost ripe and we’ve been wondering what we’re going to do with them all…

I mentioned this to one of the mum’s at the local toddler group and it turns out her husband and his mate make their own cider.  Happy days.  They live in the village and have a hand-made apple press in their garden shed.

They’ve apparently been on the look out for a good source of local apples for years – so they’ve come up today to check out their potential new supply.    They’ve brought a sugar measuring device with them and seem pretty happy with the results.   2 of the trees are dessert apples for eating and the rest are for cooking, as we suspected.   Both can be used to make their cider.    They’ll come back to pick them next week while we’re away.

250 kilos will make 250 bottles and they think that’s roughly what they’ll collect.  So we can expect a crate or 2 in return next year.


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Club foot! (Aug 24)

We have a veggie patch disaster – club root – or club foot as I’ve been mistakenly (and embarrassingly) describing it to the neighbours…has attacked nearly ALL our brassicas.

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So I’m afraid half our winter veg supply; the sprouts, cauliflower and cabbages (with all their lovingly placed collars) are not going to make it.   And it was all going so well…

It’s a fungal infection that comes from something in the soil.  It stunts growth in the roots and therefore the plants.  There’s really not much we can do about it – apart from trying to find strains of club foot resistant brassicas in future.   Ed not surprisingly is forlorn after all his hard work, especially today  – as he decided to pull them all up.

However, even though we’re rookies, the rest of the patch looks really healthy and with our intermittent removal of slugs (fond of lettuce) and caterpillar eggs  (prefer curly kale) it looks like the rest of our veg should be fine.

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A puzzle? (Aug 4)

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There are large hooks on the hall walls that run from the first floor to the top of the house and we can’t work out what they’re for.  We’ve considered family portraits (too low), lanterns (too many – and no hooks on the ground floor), tapestries (wrong place) and the previous owners can’t tell us either.    They’ve been put in quite roughly so we don’t think they were part of the original Georgian interior.  We’ve been told that the army used the house in The Second World War so maybe they were put there to string up light bulbs powered by a generator…

It’s a puzzle and everyone who comes to stay asks about them.


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The fruit bushes (Aug 1)

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We’ve got 4 gooseberry bushes and they are weighed down with fruit.   Our other fruit bushes (blackcurrant and redcurrant) were stripped by the birds.    They had a feast one evening – and when Ed went in the next day, so many had gone he initially thought that someone had crept into the walled garden overnight and stolen them all…

Covering the fruit bushes with netting WAS on our list to avoid this happening but like many things on the list there are never enough hours.   Clearly though the birds are not keen on gooseberries so we’ve had quite a harvest.   Today we collected more for a crumble and the rest to freeze for gooseberry fool.


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Veggie patch guinea pigs (Jul 22)

 

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The veggie patch is now looking much more professional.  The new wooden posts arrived a few days ago and Ed put them in with the help of Mr C and his digger.  Mr C is also an expert on leeks – and apparently ours weren’t deep enough – so Ed replanted them.  Ed ordered a huge piece of net to cover the whole thing which will keep out the birds. The carrots (in the front) have a finer net over them to stop carrot root fly – put together by our friend Dan who came up from London last weekend.  Clearly we need all the help we can get!

We’ve offered the patch next to us to Mr C but as it all needs digging over he’s going to start on this next year    I think he’s keen to assess our results first…


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The paddock cont’d (Jul 18)

Ed’s concerned about the paddock.    The docks, nettles and brambles (a recent discovery) are all really hard to get rid of once they take hold and are turning the paddock into impenetrable bush.  If we don’t cut them back our plan for a wild flower meadow will never come to anything.

We’ve been discussing getting a couple of goats (Ed had them when he was growing up)  or finding someone with a shetland pony (we’ve seen some in a field near here and I’ve been asking around) but we still haven’t managed to sort anything out.  So in desperation Ed started on it this morning with the strimmer.

It was looking like an extremely long day  – the paddock is 2 acres – when Mr C turned up like a knight in a shining tractor.  It took him, his tractor and his mower less than an hour to do the whole lot.  We owe him dinner.

While we don’t have any animals and I’m sure Mr C has better things to do, we need to find another solution.  A new tractor is out of the question so Ed’s now intent on trying to fix the mower attachment for the mini-tractor that the previous owners left us.   It’s rusting away in the grass – and looks like it’s been there for years.   It seems he can turn his hand to anything as he’s already re-modelled the rotting trailer (also abandoned in the grass) so hopefully he can work some magic on the mower too…


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Adding up radiators (Jul 16)

We have a mishmash of radiators here and as part of our heating overhaul we’ve worked out that some of them (all the ones from the 50’s) have either no impact because they’re not big enough or they’re rusty and leaking.  We need to replace just over a dozen.

However the handful of Victorian cast iron ‘column’ radiators we have, work well and look lovely.  So our plan is to get more – as cheaply as possible.

Working out what sizes we need has involved a mind-blowing set of sums;    I’ve had to work out the heat output (in kilowatts) we need in each room based on the room’s dimensions.   I’ve then had to deduct the heat supplied by any existing radiators to establish what’s missing.   All my kilowatt figures then have to be converted to old fashioned BTU’s – as this how the heat output is measured in old cast iron radiators.  Once I know what heat output I need I then have to find the right size of radiator with the right dimensions so that it will fit into the space (often under a window). At this point my eyes are squinting as there’s a number of options depending on how the columns in each radiator are arranged  –  from tall and thin to short and fat…Much like the 2 different plumbers who reneged on doing the calculations for me.

It’s all going to be worth it though as I’ve worked out that reconditioned salvage is going to cost us at least half the price of new (a whole other set of calculations) – and hunting around for them is obviously much more fun.

So I’ve been scouring ebay, gumtree and the local flea markets and I even found a farmer nearby who sells stuff that’s been thrown out of old farmhouses.  I’ve found 4 on our list this way.  But the most obvious place is salvage yards and as there are two near here we headed over today with my copious notes in hand.

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Several hours later and I’d ticked off another 8.   So we’re nearly there.  They will all need to be sent off to be pressure tested, sandblasted and painted (colour still to choose) and given that this is a 6 week turn around (with a round trip to Edinburgh) they should arrive in time to coincide with the installation of the new boiler…

Surely this can’t all go to plan….