Chapelhill Steading

Verity was very lucky this Christmas. She has become the guardian of a rare Twisby, who came to Marie and Francis's house with a label with her name on it!
Twisby's are apparently quite lethargic and sad creatures who originate from North of Aberdeen. They are quite shy and not many people have had the lucky fortune to see one.
Verity's Twisby is a bit different from the others as she has a bit of colour on her - they are normally very very grey in complexion. This one has little speckles of pink. Francis thinks the colouration might be evidence that our Twisby is slightly more cheerful than the others.
Marie and Francis asked us to watch her behaviour very closely and to report anything that we notice that might be useful to Twisby specialists.
Well. Today something VERY interesting happened. We found out that our Twisby has a taste for Roses chocolates... we thought they were only meant to like the taste of rotting plaster and munching on old building materials, so this has been an amazing Twisby research outcome!

Yep. It's very chilly up North.
This morning we woke up and our water pipes had all frozen up... so we had no running water for a while. We had to get the space heater out and set it going under the caravan with it's powerful rocket launching fire blasting hot flames. That was a bit hairy, but got the pipes melted fairly fast! Hah! We avenged the freezing coldness well this year... last year we just sat here and let it freeze us up good for five days. We have wised up good to that living hell madness.

I hate the cold.

We just got back from a very wonderful Christmas... Thankyou everybody for helping it be such a lovely one. We all got lovely gifts and got treated well by the folks we saw. Sorry to those that we didn't see this year (especially George and John... who we were planning a really exciting Christmas with for a while there. We hope you had a nice one filled with magic none the less and hope to see you really really soon...) Merry Christmas.

A couple of days ago a big lorry came and woke us up with this enormous delivery of itchy hairy rock wool insulation. This stuff goes in the walls and keeps the house nice and cosy!

I took it upon myself to get on with putting as much of it in the walls as was possible, straight away. We wanted it to go inside so it didn't get wet or dirty... but theres such a lot of it that the best storage solution was to just get it in situ straight away!
After we got it in the steading, we realised each slab would have to be measured and cut to size before being fitted into the studding. This was a bit of a blow for morale because we'd thought the stud gaps might be the same as the size of rock wool slab. Oh No! that would have been much too easy! So, we started cutting them to size...

While I got on with that... Stuart got himself tooled up with a large super dooper nail gun and begun to put the partition walls into place. We now have a utility room, bathroom and bedroom all ready to be plasterboarded. Just one more partition wall to go and that job will be finished!

We are very pleased with it, but my face is suffering a bit from all the itchy scratchy insulation that has got into it... it's quite red and sore now.
Other than that we have been pretty busy with kids Christmas parties. Yesterday Verity was a chicken in a cock a doodle Christmas... which was very wonderful, and Emmie went to the baby club Christmas party and ate lots of bread and melon. Tomorrow is the local kids party at the community hall and we are expecting Santa to drop by with lots of exciting bits in his sack.

Today brought an exciting surprise! A luvverly package containing these luvverly willow stars for the kids...

They are made of our friend Myles' home grown willow sticks, and are really something quite special. Now the girls each have a special Xmas decoration hand made by Uncle Myles in their bedrooms... they are both VERY pleased!In fact we had to prize Verity's away from her this evening ... she actually had it in bed with her!! (Bit spikey, we thought... and a potential fire hazard, possibly!!).

Today me and Emmie wrapped up warm and braved the snow and ice. The countryside looked stunning in the bright wintery sunshine. Emmies hot milk and my cup of tea tasted REALLY extra specially good when we got back in too!

Here are some snowy pictures for your perusal...

If you look closely enough at them you might notice that they are a wee bit different in places? Some are from this time last year, and the others were taken during this mornings snow shower! The pics have made me feel quite happy actually, on a week where I've felt a bit disappointed knowing that Christmas inside our new house is looking less and less likely! ... Happy because you can see so much major change! So, we have been busy after all!
In last years pic of the end of the building you can see that the steading still had the old roof on - so since then we have had all the old slates off, the old windows out, the old wood sarking taken off and all this replaced with nice new stuff. The outdoor steps have been rebuilt and the new windows and door are now in... rendering has been done here and there and we have a few extra gabion boxes filled up since the first pic was taken!
The other two pics show a lot of change too - the new rooflight and solar panels look good, as do the big window and the front door.

We've got rid of the old floor and put in the new one since the first picture was taken and our underfloor heating system is in and ready to be set up and turned on! And last night me and Stuart were looking at nice floors and pricing up our options, so it's really not all that far off now after all...