Clearing out the crud

..... lots of it, too.

More work on the ceiling for the new workshop. Up there the previous owner kept her chickens, along with faggots for burning in the bread-oven. The result of many years of neglect is a laminate of thin twigs and larger sticks, stuck together with thick layers of chicken-poo. Very dry and dusty, with an unmistakeable smell.

First task was to get the access up there organised. With full concern about health and safety, I constructed the temporary access:



It's secured to a bit of rafter with blue polypropylene rope, and in fact turned out to be really quite steady. The stepladder wasn't quite long enough, but I think the concrete blocks work very well.

I was then faced with this:



The pile of twigs and droppings conceals a floor that is full of woodworm, not nailed down, and missing in places. An ideal location to be working. I shoveled it all up into a plastic dustbin, and hauled it down the steps and out into the woods to be burned. This added a new dimension to the smell.

After the first day it looked something like this:



And substantial amounts had fallen through into the workshop below. Rather too late, I wished I'd put the tools away (or at least covered them up). For the final bits I put the wheelbarrow underneath and raked the muck straight down, and I now have very little floor and a large pile of ashes in the woods:



The boards on the left hand side are loose and only temporary. In the next week or two I am hoping to remove all the old flooring, cross the existing oak beams with joists at right angles (on smaller centres than the 100cm for the beams) and panel over with ply.

I will then have a dust-tight workshop and a storage area where I can admire the view out of the door formerly used for putting the hay up:



Solar heating

It's almost exactly six months since I installed the solar panels, and the electronic controller tells me that the pump has been running for 680 hours. That's a measure of how much useable sunshine there has been since December: an average of about 3 and three-quarter hours each day. It's not a record of the amount of sunshine, as the panels gather some heat even if it's slightly overcast - equally, there are a few hours each day when the sun doesn't fall on the panels (early morning and late evening between the spring and autumn equinoxes). Since April we have only had to use the boiler for hot water on three or four days at most, for a total of less than ten hours.