May 28th 2020

[H] The weather continues to be glorious and we continue to make a mess at Cragside! We are now working on taking the top off the crag. The ground is a complete mixture of stony earth, friable rock that shatters relatively easily and solid rock. We’re trying to retain rocky outcrops in the right places to make features in the garden but that’s actually easier said than done. Having removed the old house and started digging there isn’t necessarily solid rock where we hoped there might be, and where we need to excavate and don’t want solid rock we seem to have hit bedrock! We’ve watched Youtube videos of other people preparing their site and seen how easy it can be to dig down when you’ve got normal soils, but on our type of ground it’s a whole different ball game. This is going to take us weeks.

It went in the end!! We could really do with getting the pecker back. We were hiring one from a local farmer for a while but he claimed it back a few days ago to do another job and Malcolm’s feeling a bit bereft without it!

In our enthusiasm to start excavating the crag we’d forgotten about a garden bench that was now marooned at the top of the old drive and realised that getting it out was going to be a bit of an obstacle course. But no problem in the end, Kubi once again proved useful – the bench fitted neatly on to the big digger bucket so Kubi could just lift it out, swing it over the piles of rubble and bring it down to the bottom of the plot. And it’s given us an idea for a 'Cragside Digger Ride' to entertain family and friends when they come to visit (although it may be a while yet before we can have any visitors due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic). I can tell you it felt a lot higher than it looks in the photo, but we'd done a full risk assessment(!) and I donned my hard hat so it was perfectly safe!

May 17th 2020

[H] Another month gone and we’re still finding plenty we can get on with despite lockdown. Malcolm is still “self-isolating in the digger” for a couple of hours most days, but he’s now moved on to pecking rock. Part of the new house is going to be built where the crag is so the crag’s got to go. Some of the rock breaks away ok, some of it is pretty stubborn. It’s very noisy and it seems never-ending but, bit by bit, the big lump of rock is slowly getting smaller.

We have installed a drain along our new boundary wall to help disperse surface water that used to cause flooding at the foot of our drive and overflow into next door’s garden. Fingers crossed this will help both us and the neighbour, although you never really know what the water’s going to do until it rains heavily (and we haven’t had any rain for a couple of months now). On Friday we moved the caravan, down from the top of the old drive to a new location by the gate. It was a bit tight manoeuvring the car and caravan down the steep slope and bend in the drive but we managed it with no damage done to either car or caravan. The caravan is now the other side of the drive from our power and water supply so we’ve buried a length of old downpipe (off the old house!) under the drive so that we can run the power cable and hosepipe through it to the caravan’s new position. Hopefully the caravan can stay here for the duration of the build as it’s out of the way of any excavation or building.

With the caravan moved, Malcolm is now free to start digging away at the top of the crag. We have no idea how much of it is stony earth and how much is solid rock and he’s dying to find out. First job - dig out the old power cable and water supply that ran up to the old house. The old power cable was a beast of a thing, full of copper and lead, weighed a tonne and was well buried about two feet under the old drive. But with Kubi’s strength and Malcolm’s increasing ability at the controls, the cable was out, beautifully curled up with the rest of the scrap metal and the trench filled in again, all within half an hour. That digger is worth its weight in gold – we couldn’t do any of what we’re doing at the moment without it.

At South View all the walls and ceilings on the top floor are now gone. The old lime plaster that we stripped off the walls is non-toxic and environmentally friendly so we bagged that up and added it to the hardcore at Cragside to help bind the larger bits of crushings together. The lathes make great kindling and old timber studs can be re-used or chopped up for firewood. The only things we’ve had to set aside to take to the tip are the old night storage heaters, plasterboard from stud walls and the cement render that some of the stone walls had been patched with in the past. Having cleared the top floor I then spent three days re-plastering the stone gable walls with insulating lime plaster. It’s amazing stuff - very light, easy to work with, good thermal properties, eco-friendly and, most importantly, breathable.

April 22nd 2020

[H] A month has passed and we are still in lockdown. It is becoming increasingly apparent that this isn’t going to be over any time soon and we are going to have to get used to living differently. Oddly though, we seem to have been very busy!

Malcolm has been “self-isolating in the digger” most days, moving the mountain of crushings around the site to create new levels and a clean, sound base at the entrance of the site for lorries to turn and unload deliveries. I’ve been quite involved locally with volunteering and contacting older folk in the valley to make sure they’re ok. Sadly we’ve had our first Covid-19 death in the village and are desperately hoping there won’t be any more. The weather has been glorious and lambs are starting to appear in the valley, so we try to focus on that, keep occupied and realise how lucky we are to be locked down where we are.

We’ve started working on the top floor of South View, our “other project”. It was already a converted loft and the big job is to strip it back to the bare stone and slate, add insulation and then put all the walls and ceilings back and make it nice again. Just a bit of redecorating really!! The worst part so far has been pulling down the lathe and plaster ceiling because the roof void was full of ancient soot and it all came down with the ceiling in a horrible, choking, black cloud. And some of the walls had been patched in the past with cement render which is not breathable and so had to come off (see the South View section for an explanation of why) - that was a bit messy too. Luckily we already have the gear because trying to get hold of a face mask these days could be difficult.

We also decided that now would be a good time to start growing our own food. We plan a large vegetable plot at Cragside when it’s finished but currently the ground we’ve set aside for that is being used as a holding bed for plants that we rescued from around the garden before it got trashed. So, just to give ourselves a bit more work to do(!), we’ve dug up the garden at South View and turned it into an allotment.