So maybe while killing time between packed buses, flossing your teeth or changing a nappy, some of you in Melbourne, Singapore, Auckland, Nashville or Biggleswade might have been wondering what the hell has been going on?
Blog entries as regular as a Saturday hangover in London climaxing in torrid prose about power planes, drilling jigs and threaded rod and then nothing. Nada. Pure radio silence.
City bred greenhorns. Perhaps they threw in the towel on this folly of a house build and overly ambitious micro farm? Maybe Rob dyed his grey, grew a real beard and shed ten years, abandoning the good life for the better life of East Vancouver hipster. Karen trading her plenty-of-sweat-required 1/3 acre veg garden for two square feet of containered micro-greens on a fourth floor balcony. Cleaning the country living out from under her nails and sipping a latte while posting earnestly ironic photos of Mia in skinny jeans on Pinterest.
Na, none of that happened. Though I’m still working on that beard and Mia and her jeans are pretty skinny.
You may recall in my last instalment back in early June, we’d just finished our heavy timber post and beam frame. After basking in glory for about ninety seconds, thoughts turned to winter. Sure late May flowers blanketed the roadsides and Karen’s garden burst with the promise of ten thousand green shoots already a month into what would become a five month drought. But in my mind I saw only the spectre of November gales lashing down, turning a year’s work to rot.
The vision was powerful, the way forward clear.
You can’t live in a wood frame with no roof so it was time to stop the self-congratulatory B.S. and get hammering. The solution to cold night sweats about rain half a year in the future? A five month diet of ten hour days. As a consequence, I ended up too shattered to type, think up witty things to say or bother with showering.
So what follows over the next half dozen blog posts is a heady tale of high angle acrobatics, repetitive stress syndrome, 30,000 nails, an epic builder’s tan and the tendency to Shanghai unwary visitors into lifting something really, really heavy. All in the bid to get that bleeding roof on.
Next up, how we got our (tongue) and groove.
From this
End of May 2015
To this
Mid-Oct 2015
the handcrafted life 
oh Rob, how exciting—–and beautiful. I can see just from this view what a job this must have been. What a special winter this will be.
Proud of you all, will watch for details with interest,
Dianne
Wow! Nothing clever to say here, but holly #*!!! What an amazing transformation. I can hardly wait until next spring/summer when we can come and lift heavy things with you. Perhaps a magnum?
Lots of Love
Melody
Rob!!! You are such an inspiration to everyone! Was just wondering about you when this popped into the inbox. I hope you’ve got a hell of a lot of Aloe Vera gel for that builder’s tan! By comparison everything I’ve been up to in my life is mere trivia. Looking forward to the next instalment. Sending good vibes from Wandsworth! XXXX Victoria (and Charlie) Day xx
Hooray!
Progress doesn’t seem slow at all to me. We’re not even at the stage of the May picture after over a year of working on putting up a barn. And it’s not going to be half so beautiful! And as for that strange silent space in the blog – quite understandable, mine seems to do it most years at about the same time. It’s just a thing blogs do 🙂