Larick House – a Sustainable House in Kintyre

One good thing about Hurricane Ba’bag was that it forced us into finishing the upstairs painting. We’d been putting it off because the double height ceilings are so hard to do. Otherwise, Ba’bag and his cousin on the following Tuesday, gave us plenty to think about, I was so pleased the new greenhouse stood up to them! Even the locals thought it was all a bit much but there appears to have been surprising little damage. Continue reading →

Having had a number of funerals to attend in recent years, we were delighted to have had a new grandson this year and the wedding of Emily and Richard. I think that both events provided a lot of pleasure for everyone. In June we celebrated John’s 60th with his sister and brother in law and Emily and Richard at Tibbie Shiels where John went on to do a Long O the following day.

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Apologies for the long silence. There was a media temple/wordpress hack that put us off-line for a while and it proved more complicated to get the Larick House site up and running. So finally here goes: This is ridiculous I know but we have had to apply for yet another extension. When we finally got ourselves set to invite the Building Inspector along, it turned out that we need a larger window in one of the bedrooms to act as a fire escape. Somewhere along the line we took our eyes off the ball and ordered a window that’s hinges don’t open wide enough. We also need to get barriers, aka juliette balconies, for the opening windows.

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No, not that kind. Ignoring the wise words of our friend Val ‘not to set deadlines’ we tried to get the work done for the Building Warrant before it expired. This meant tracking down the Building Warrant which we couldn’t find for a while. Do we have it or does Chris? We had it, buried amongst the SEPA permissions.

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We were fortunate to find a new plasterer after Ian got a new job. Dave comes from Carradale and keeps trying to retire but is too much in demand. Along with Dave2 he did a fantastic job clambering about the scaffolding and planks like a proverbial  monkey and has finished all the walls and ceilings in just over a week, including some loverly curves at the eaves. We still have to finish off the hall and stair wall but managed to finish flooring the main bedroom in merbau by hiding the worst bits under the bed! Since then, the weather has been fantastic so we’ve been working outside.

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Lanzarote was lovely and we made a return visit to Cesar Manrique’s house, one of our first inspirations. We also had a day at Ecobuild in London on the way back. Everyone was getting excited about the new Feed In Tarriffs and jumping on the bandwagon. The Show has grown and grown with many com claiming to have some eco-credentials and thereby being entitled to exhibit and a lot of it was marginal. But we did discover that the first passivhaus in Scotland has been built in Glasgow. Must check that out.

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First of all, apologies for not updating the blog for so long. Like the rest of the country we had a very cold spell over Christmas with temperatures well below zero for a prolonged period. As it remained sunny for much of the time we had that thaw/freeze scenario which leaves paths and driveways treacherous. I confess that we smashed our eco credentials and bought some coal so that we could keep the fire on overnight.

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This is mainly for the benefit of Christmas letter readers and summarises our whole year, not just the house build.

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Since the stair went in we have been prioritising work on the second bathroom as that is going to be needed at Christmas time.

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