Well the title says it all. This post will be more about why I haven’t made progress on the boat so if you were hoping for some in depth boatbuilding stroll on…. if you are vaguely interested in the goings on in my little corner of the world then welcome, and scroll on.

January 2021 was the last update! I was happily looking forward to a productive year but as is so often the case when man plans, the gods laugh.

Storm Eunice took one look at my beautiful (it’s in the eye of the beholder!) bowshed structure and thought, I’ll see just how structural that is. Result? Bowshed 0, Eunice 1. After all our hard work and not inconsiderable expense I finally had to build what I should have built to start with, a strong scaffold structure.

Several hundred pounds of scaffold later, some much needed help from the lads and Flamingo had a cover again. We used the remains of the Bowshed as the roof and fingers crossed it will last a bit longer.

The next obstacle to navigate on the course to completion and launch was rather more daunting. The slightly quirky design of our 1960s gem of a house meant we needed to extend. Plans were drawn for a Den and Office downstairs and a swanky new Bathroom and Bedroom upstairs. The slope of the garden meant a retaining wall, and while we were at it, and with no concept of how much work this would entail, we decided to make the area big enough for a little patio for enjoying morning coffee outside the new home office… because we have so much time on our hands we need new places to spend it relaxing in…

800 concrete blocks each weighing 25kg, hundreds of lengths of rebar, countless tons of spoil removed, goodness knows how many cubic metres of concrete poured (including the huge dollop I spilled with my appalling aim!) After some hired help with the ground work and foundation, Tracy and I pretty much built the whole thing apart from the roof and the render. (yes, yes Luke, I know you helped a bit, oh alright and thanks Lou for shifting so many blocks from the drive, oh and Tilly and Timor for smashing old tiles into hardcore), It was a steep learning curve and there are lots of things we would do differently but a year on and we’re weather tight, warm, and ready to fit out the interior.

Insulated Concrete Formers

ICF (Insulated Concrete Former) is a brilliant construction method and it goes together like lego. Steel reinforcing where specified and then concrete poured into the cavity, or in my case all over the nice clean scaffold! If you’re starting from scratch and not trying to match an existing bricks and mortar building you can save a lot of time and materials by designing to suit the sizes of all the various elements of the system, and in terms of complexity, we did a 1 day course, read the manual and watched a few YouTube videos so its not rocket science!

The Irony!

While Tracy and I are lugging 25kg concrete blocks around and constructing the Great Wall of Crowborough or Stalag Scharlings as we fondly christened it, Luke and Tilly were staring down the eye of the tiger, working out in their ‘jailhouse gym’ …. Oh the irony!

I’m going with the extension as my main excuse for the deplorable lack of progress on Flamingo as it’s about the same floor area as a 2 bedroom flat, and laying those concrete blocks was seriously hard work!

Of course there were lots of other goings on, mountains to climb, boats to sail, boards to paddle, apples to pick and press and work to do.

That’s about it for this catch up on a nearly 3 year hiatus…(!) I think I’ll save something for future posts to give the illusion that lots is happening from now on… though that sentence may have given the game away…

nah…

no one has read this far down the page surely…?