Construction

It's mostly been a weekend of construction, in one way or another. On Saturday we continued work on the beehive insulation: painting the EPS with masonry paint (to protect it from slugs and UV degradation; it is, of course, waterproof intrinsically), and preparing the parts to attach them to each hive.

On Sunday, while Liz did some work on the downstairs bathroom (the paint we used appears to have created a rather unpleasant smell, so we're washing the walls down, and repainting) and other bits in the house, I built a storage rack on the hillside. It's for storing spare beehive components, especially the boxes in which they produce honey, because they aren't needed for six months of the year, and there will, in time, be the best part of a hundred of them. I've built the storage as an extension of the original platform we made, by driving three new support posts about 1.4m downhill from the lower edge of that. I've then thrown up wooden beams from the old posts to the new, and along each set of three, before adding extra joists and beams to create a set of square sites, each 460mm across. That's the footprint of all the beehive boxes for the design we use, so anything (almost) can be stacked on any one of the fifteen spaces, up to about a metre high.

Construction of storage rack (all © Ian 2017)

All of that done, yesterday we were able to wrap the bees in their insulated jackets (well, the hives, not the individual bees), which means that, between that and their fondant feed, the bees are pretty much settled for the winter. I shall keep visiting them every week or two, to make sure they don't go hungry.

Today, though, has been a mammoth list of work. We've got the plasterboard and spare cabinet boards out of the preservatory, ready to go upstairs (for the last bits of work, long overdue, in the guest suites). To further clear the room, the mahogany shelves are going to Jenny and Philip (staged from the dining room), and the spare bathroom cabinets are also in there while we decide their fate. All the spare insulation board is now cut into manageable sizes, and is in the loft (from which I even remembered to extract the tile cutter, ready for use in the bathroom!). The smaller windows (the new ones) have almost been tidied up with reveals and caulk—they just need false fronts to the windowboards, which will happen when I set up the router for a session. I popped out to collect the car from the garage on a bike, and get a haircut, while Liz cleaned the preservatory. Then we made a set of drawer fronts for the beehive's monitoring trays, and I installed these and took some spare hive boxes up to the newstorage rack. Lastly, we've set up the dining table we received from my parents in the middle of the newly cleaned room, which is now in a fit state to press apples and extract honey.