Maintenance trip July 14-18, 2008 |
Again we had awful weather but again we had help – Andreas and Stefan from Munich worked for two long hard days in exchange for being fed (they had miscalculated somewhat) before going on to Corrour; Ian and his wife Claire walked over from Ben Alder Cottage, stayed one night and Ian painted the gable end of the main-building giving us a chance to see how it will look when the whole of it is painted – it will be smart but that’s not the point, the wood will be protected too.
The last few days and when we went back the third time - (no photo’s – the camera lens jammed) – we had good weather and managed to get all the essential work done apart from fitting the threshold to the small room which Grant is making in his workshop and which we will fit sometime in August before the real winter gales start.
The exercise of working on the bothy taught us a lot – some things are much harder to do without the correct tools immediately to hand, some things come up much better than we expected such as the windows which may well not need to be replaced for sometime; some jobs just need a lot of man (person - to be politically correct!) power such as the exterior painting – we got only a tiny bit done because of the weather and we were only two people – next time we will get more bodies to do that sort of work. But basically the bothy is in good nick and better for the work we have done and we are more knowledgeable and realistic than before. Had there been a working camera with us we would have proudly shown the chimney capped (water penetration stopped), the gutters fixed in position and the runaways going underground (and taking the runoff away from the building unlike in one of the later photo’s that shows the gutters in their intermediate and precarious state), the doors painted and rehung and the bolts removed (safer from fire risk) and the inside of the big dorm painted (now much brighter). We hope to finish the essentials this autumn so that it is straight forward maintenance thereafter till the windows need replacing and a toilet (hopefully but that depends on MBA priorities) is scheduled.
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