Last week was our last week working on the building this decade. The cafe will be open every day except Christmas day, so we hope to be busy – so we won’t be able to do any building work because we always try to do that work in pairs.
We might be able to carry on cleaning the stain off the dividing doors in the main room, but as Jodie is already doing a great job of cleaning this, maybe not.
Having stripped spare tiles from one roof last week, this week we stripped tiles off the roof we are trying to reslate, above. Just out of shot is the scaffolding tower from which we are working, and this roof is wonderfully out of the wind which makes for relatively comfortable working. We stripped the tiles off on a day with good weather…
…and when the following day was wet and windy, we insulated inside instead. The crawl space under the roof is a bit limited, but we need to increase the insulation significantly. The pipes run just above the ceiling, so we are insulating under the roof rather than over the ceiling, to be sure the pipes (which are already lagged) can’t freeze. As it happens, we were both amazed that having insulated half the roof, the water temperature in the house is already noticably higher!
The next day, we returned outside and stripped a few more slates, before battening down the tarpaulin as solidly as we could to withstand the mild Welsh weather (?) until the New Year.
Philly is here with us at the moment, home from her studies in Cambridge. I strongly suspect the thrill of New Testament Greek paled when Mike suggested they both tried teaching Lola how to balance a festive pringle on her nose…
…which Mike then decided was not a sufficiently testing option, so proceeded to dress Lola in a Christmas jumper. I’m not sure she was terribly impressed – what do you think?
As this will be my last blog in 2019, I must finish with a hearty ‘Happy Christmas everyone’, and I look forward to sharing our exploits with you new year!