The small details to finish the north and west wall Sunday, 21-Mar-21 20:31:05 CET

Fascia boards for the south wall Monday, 05-Apr-21 08:58:15 CEST

Sunday, 28-Mar-21 21:20:26 CEST

Started working on the south wall

This week the window sills arrived, and I finished the sills for the north and west walls. We started working on the south wall. The trees in our tree storage are all planted.

Monday 22 March

Yesterday we ordered the final set of window sills. Today in the evening, we got the confirmation. I do hope we get them before the upcoming weekend.

Tuesday 23 March

Today it was supposed to happen! The heap of charcoal from the New-Year celebrations was supposed to be removed. I suppose it could have been possible because a clean-up truck drove through the street and removed all sorts of garbage and litter. Did it remove the heap of charcoal? No, it did not. I think that was a missed opportunity. We will see how long that heap stays there. Perhaps, it is just gone one day, and I will not know who removed it. Will I start missing the heap of charcoal? I am surprised bored kids have not spread it around or started writing graffiti with it. The thing is that kids don’t play outside, and they are not bored anymore. They are at home playing video games. You only see kids outside when there is a tangible reason to be outside—setting off fireworks or something.

This evening I blogged about last week. I had used numbered lists with uppercase letters, and my blog system choked on that, so I had to debug that thing. Eventually, the blog came up on the Internet.

Wednesday 24 March

Today I worked half day. I have decided to take the Wednesday mornings off in April and May to work on the new house the whole day on those Wednesdays.

Had it not been nice if the electrician came and installed the outlet next to the door? Right now, we take the electricity through a window. It is a long cable, so we can run it around the house if we want. First, we had the cable through the door, but walking in and out, we damaged the cable. When it broke, we decided to take it through the window.

I have not heard anything from our electrician, nor plumber and ventilation specialist. Our carpenter contacted us and excused himself that he could not take on more work for us. It is like the building market is in a crunch mode right now. That is what it is. We got most things settled. If we had been in an enormous hurry, we had been complaining and moaning, but we have our things to do, and I think we will manage fine somehow.

Today I first worked on the window sills above the doors and windows on the north wall’s ground floor. I have one pallet with reinforced hooks lying on two trestles. This workbench is portable so that I can place it where I want to work. It is not that difficult to shape the window sills once you know it; later in this blog post, I will tell you how I do it.

It was lovely weather today. Marleen painted seems, and I was hammering on the window sills. The sills on top of the windows are narrower. Below the windows, we ordered new sills that are wider. There need to be four centimeters from the edge of the sill to the wall.

With the first window sills on the north wall, I started pondering if it was not okay to start taking down the scaffold and move it to the south wall, but we have too much to do on the North wall, so it is just about being patient. We will most certainly paint the area around the window white, but that is a later project.

Next up, I started working on the sills of the west wall. It is the same procedure—no new thrills. I tried to be clever and skip a step, and that did not go well. The sill I made got too long. How should one make it shorter? Luckily one window had to have a shorter sill to reuse the too-long window sill for that. Cut off the wrong edge and started over. On 3 January, I wrote about things we learned:

• Measuring things include writing down the result
• Also, write what object you measured or how many
• Don’t read measurements upside down. A six may become a nine and vice versa.
• Please don’t change a proven concept unless it is incorrect.
• If changing a concept, replace it with something better, and don’t replace it with something on the fly.

The last was from today.

I worked on the west side’s sills, and they are so beautiful when they are lying next to each other ready to be mounted. It is the same as with planks. It is a lot of preparation, but the stack of planks ready to be mounted looks so beautiful when done. Then the actual work is quick.

In the evening, I would start blogging, but I got the idea of creating a recursive pattern. A long time ago, I had another website, and there I explored recursive patterns. Instead of blogging this evening, I started drawing. It was the first time I was doing art for a long time, and it took the entire evening to draw. It was feeling nice to be back. First, I created a tile on a paper that I then transferred over to another paper. I could start to correct the transitions between the pattern on the other edge with the two papers. When I was satisfied, I took a photo of the paper and opened it on the computer. Preferably I had scanned the paper, but the scanner had become too old. I have to look into the issue with the scanner another time. On the computer, I repeated the tiles four times.

After extensive searching, I could find the original recursive pattern that I made, 1999. I had that on a website that is long gone. When I see this, I think it had been nice to create a program for making these patterns more easily. There are enough side projects right now. I can put this on the stack for now. You never know when it comes back.

Thursday 25 March

On Thursday evening, I am finally starting blogging on this week’s blog post. It is not ideal to start blogging about a week when the week is almost over—room for improvement.

Friday 26 March

Today the wider window sills arrived, meaning I can continue and hammer these sills into shape this weekend!

Saturday 27 March

Today we were early because we booked a time for shopping at a hardware store. That is the latest pandemic rule; you need to book a time to go shopping. When shopping, only the person with the reservation is allowed in. We were on time for the time slot, I had to wait in the parking lot, and my wife went shopping for a manual sprinkler. She also bought a new handle for tubes of kit, one that felt better in her hands. With these new purchases plus our package from yesterday, we went to the new house.

We ordered these window sills from Zetwerkprofiel.nl, and I like this company. Both times that we order the sills from them, the package arrives in mint condition. Chapeau! They distribute the smaller parts in the package evenly to support the more extended parts of the package. Besides that, they hire distribution companies they trust. The website, the product, and the delivery make this a fantastic product. We ordered sills that are covered in zink and painted with white paint. I could have got the sills cheaper if we ordered unpainted sills, but I think it is more challenging to paint the raw sills than having factory-painted sills. It is just a guess. No one confirmed this to us. Never mind, the price difference won’t matter so much for the low quantity we got here.

I created a temporary rack for the sills to store them and not be afraid that they fall over and get damaged or damage something while falling.

With unpacking and temporary storage done, I started to prepare for hammering on the window sills. I set up my workplace near the wooden chip path on the north side of the house. I wanted to have it on the north side because most of the window sills would be mounted on the north side’s windows. You can see the pallet with the steel-enforced corners. That is the workbench for working with the window sills. The shaping of the window sill is done from the backside. The idea is to let the edges of the short sides stick up so that the water is collected and can fall off without entering behind the planks. The outer edge of the window sill should be four centimeters out from the planks.

	The first task with the sills is to mark up the sides to be bent up. I mark them on the front of the sills, covered in protective plastic. We ordered many of the sills to be slightly longer than needed because the excess length costs less than the discount due to more sills of the same size.
	Next, I cut the marked lines. I use the angle grinder for this. It has an extra thin cutting blade.
	Now starts the bending. I turn the window sill upside down with the cut-out in line with the edge of the table.
	The side of the ridge is hammered down. For this, I got a wood mallet. I start from the outer edge working inwards to the corner. When the edge is looking like this, I stop hammering.
	Here I turned the piece around to the other corner of the work table. I am going to shape the hook of the edge. I make a ridge 45 degrees. This step’s goal isn’t easy to understand, but you will get it when you see the following picture.
	Now there is a shape created that looks a little like a pouring spout.
	From here, it is not that difficult. The spout needs to become narrower before we continue. I found that this is a good moment to peel of the protective plastic from the corner.
	Now it is no pouring spout anymore. What should we call this? A tab? The idea now is that this will be bent to the backside of the window sill. Now if the protection plastic had not been peeled off it had got stuck in the corner.
	There you have it. Now it is time to sand the edges so that they are not knife sharp. You would not like to have curious fingers to be cut up by the window sills.

This procedure for shaping the window sills is not so complicated. Now it is just a question of doing it again and again.

In the afternoon, I had finished the sills, and they were mounted below the windows. With that, my wife applied a silicone kit for extra safety here and there to make things extra tight.

Perhaps we can start taking down the scaffold of the north side already tomorrow. That would be fantastic. The silicone can get a bit of paint before we do that. We will see tomorrow how that goes.

Our carpenter was supposed to come to us today, but he did not show up. On the other hand, our woodstove specialist came to us. He brought with him a missing bolt of the woodstove. He interviewed us about our feelings about the woodstove, and we are still delighted.

My wife cut beams for the south wall. We need to extend the beams from the builder with short pieces at the bottom of the wall. With this action, you can say that now we started working on the south wall!

Then I started working on the window sills of the west wall. I finished making them but decided not to put them up because it was time to go home.

Today we had visitors to our water reservoir! Two ducks came to have a bath in our pond. They even looked like they were eating in the pond. It was great to see them!

	The female duck climbed up to the little plateau that I created while digging the dyke.
	The male duck climbed the steep part.
	The male duck was proud he could stand on the slope.
	The female duck climbed up to stable ground while the male duck was still standing on the steep slope.

 

The couple climbed up, rested above the pond, and did not bother about me working on the window sills. I do hope they will come back another time. It was nice to have them there.

This evening, it was almost difficult to leave the new house because it is a lovely place. Sure, it gets dark at some point, and you want to sleep, and we don’t have all the everyday things you need to stay in a house comfortably, but that is reality. We cleaned up our stuff, turned on the cameras, locked, and went home.

Sunday 28 March

Today started the daylight saving time. We turned the clocks forward one hour. I do recall talking about perhaps we will stop using daylight saving time in Europe or stay with it permanently, but I have no idea how that project is going. Will it happen, and if so, when?

It was overcast today. There was no sun to be seen for the entire day, somewhat windy and chilly. I finished mounting the window sills on the west wall, and Marleen worked on finishing the north wall. She applied some kit and painted the already dried kit. After today she only needs to paint one more layer, and then the North wall is finished.

I started applying vertical extensions to the beams on the south wall that Marleen cut yesterday. It was feeling as if I was using much energy to do very little. It was not a satisfying feeling.

Our son came with us, and he worked the entire day watering our trees and bushes. It is a monstrously big task, and he worked on it the entire day. Perhaps he is not giving water to plants the most efficient way. He is listening to a book and dreaming a lot, and perhaps some plants get more water than they need while others hardly get any water at all. On average, all plants get the right amount of water. This time there were new rules where to walk because we spread grass seeds here and there. These were the rules:

• Walking on established grass is allowed,
• Walking between the trees and bushes where we planted them in groups is allowed,
• Walking on paths is allowed.

It is frustrating not to be free to walk everywhere, but I try to adhere to the rules because it will be nice when there is grass everywhere. That will take a while. The grass will start growing when the temperature is over 10 degrees Celsius in the ground. I think that will happen next week. Perhaps already tomorrow. Then it takes two weeks before you can see the grass.

Our new friends the ducks came to us today as well. Our son splashed them with water and they were not happy about that but stayed anyway. Perhaps he is not entirely sharing our joy of having them in our pond, or he was just too bored to be bothered. We really want to have them at our place and eat from our water reservoir. That would be fantastic!

When the day was almost over, I started on the vertical beams around the big doors. It is a bit of a puzzle to get the beams right, but I made a plan that helped a lot. We went home before any of the new beams had been fastened. There is a beginning on the south wall, that is great!