Hiding the Brickwork.

With the doorway bricked up its time to render to hole to make it all neat. I am not that good at rendering, I never seem to get it level or smooth but this time it seems to have gone well.

I used two coats, the first the standard sand and cement mortar (I would like to point out at this time, that the standard building sand on the canaries is black and made from crushed volcanic rock. So it is not very fine). The top coat was Morsec (premixed dry morter, tha comes in 25 kg bags. it comes in two types, that I know of, normal and white top coat. I like using the white one). This works very well in thin coats. The result on the door opening is shown below.

Now the wall can be painted.

I think the final result was quit good.

With the last of the Morsec, I finished off the roofs of the solar power huts. That is all the structural work done on the huts now finally the walls can be painted.

Back of the huts, showing added white Morsec.

Front of huts.

P.p.p.p.Pick a Pepper.

We don’t always have a lot of luck with our produce, this year the cucumbers haven’t done very well and the tomatoes are OK but we could do with more and the lettuces we either have to many at once and they go to seed or we don’t have anything but tiny titchy ones which are no good to eat. But as usual the pepper plants have been outstanding.

Here is one load that are about to be processed ready  for the freezer where they will keep for use in curries and stir fry's all winter long.

Bye bye Door way, Hello oven

The last week we have been busy blocking up one of the door ways in to the old kitchen. Part of this is to strengthen the wall and to provide a eye level oven unit, though it may be a while before the oven will be fitted (although we have had it for a year or so. ) See the potos below for all the work.

First day: Get the base done with the power feed for the oven.

Inside

outside.

Day two:  Build the oven unit up to the first level, this is ware the oven will sit. Below it will a set of veg racks. Work progresses, now we wait for the cement to set.

Day three: Build the next level, this is where the oven will go.

View from inside.

Outside.

Day four:  First job today is to remove the old door lintel, as this is made of wood, and close up the hole. on the inside the back of the top cupboard was added, this is not as deep as the rest of the unit to allow air to vent from the oven unit.

Top cupboard of oven unit.

The final closure of the old doorway.

Day five: finish the oven unit by extending it up to the ceiling.

The finished top cupboard.

The finished oven unit.

Meeeeep Meeeeep The arrival of Meep

We have noticed the last few weeks a new arrival in our neighbourhood. Living in our wood pile and eating the stale cat food that Tabby would refuse to eat is a tiny little white kitten. We think that she(We think its a she) has been abandoned by somebody and just happened to find the food the we would throw on the compost heap, she was very thing and wobbly when she first arrived but not she looks a little stronger. Over the weeks she would come closer and closer to us. So we started to put some food and water out for her and who knows maybe one day she will allow us to pick her up. We have named her meep after the noise she makes…..meeep.

Let There Be Power

After a months on and off work the new solar power system is finished. Below you can see the power control hut with the change controller and isolation boxes. The main battery Isolation box is open showing the wiring to the fuses, isolators and current monitors.

Solar power Hut

The Current monitors are home made units based on a signal chip current measurement ic ( ACS754SCB-100-PFF ) . One of the units are shown below. It consists of the IC mounted on a peace of veroboard with the line contacts solders into two connecters that I removed from some fuse holders that we brought by mistake. (As normal on this island you can buy a car audio fuse holder that no one sells fuses for). All of this is mounted on a home made Perspex mounting panel.

Home made current monitor unit.

The last thing that we  done is mount the current solar panels on our adjustable panel mounts and connected them to the power hut. Panels mounted on adjustable mounts

Wiring starts

The solar power huts are now ready to except the components. It´s only taken 8 months to get things to this point after the make shift set up was washed out in the storm. The first parts to go in are the new (we have had it for 3 years) charge controller with the panel isolating switch and fuse box (see image below).

I will admit that as it is a 45 Amp controller and we only have 2 60W panels at the moment it is a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but once we have some more spare cash we can get a few more panels and not have to worry about the controller.

The solar charge controller finally in its hut.

Rock & Hole

With the supply of available rocks diminishing rapidly work has slowed on the wall and ramp at the front of the house.

Tabby inspects the wall for quality control

We have robbed all the stones from the floor of what was the pig pen and will some day be the observatory.

No more rocks!!!

We should just have enough stones around to just about finish this some time but that may not be for a while as other things are beginning to take precedence.

Higher, and higher

As previously explained in  Raising Ground and The walls are rising we are levelling the ground at the front of the house. The photos bellow show how this is moving along

As you can see here most of the ramp is complete

More cement on the ramp as the new back all starts to take shape

Digging away the existing edge for the new wall

A few rocks in

Almost there.

And that will do for now. Just need to top off and tidy up a few bits.

On the floor in the pig pen

In order to build the ramp and the walls out the front of the house we needed to find some extra rocks from somewhere, and one thing we wanted to do was look under the floor in the pig pen to see what was there as someday this will become the observatory and will need a very solid pier constructing to take the telescope.

Half the floor gone

As the floor of the pig pen was made of rocks  it made sense to pull them up so that they could be used in the wall and then we could look underneath.

All gone

The corn is as high as a mouse's eye.

A while a go we started the experimentation with the new warring system (see post Watering 2.0) on the boniarto and corn patches. Well it seems to be working though the corn is not that high yet it seems to be growing ok.

And the boniarto seems to be thriving. Well its green anyway.

The only problem is adjusting the taps so that an equal amount of water is supplied to each tube. Well the proof is in the pudding as they say or in this case in the pot. we will just have to wait and see how the crop is.

The walls are rising

Two weeks work and it does not look like much has happened. The ramp is taking shape but not by much.

 

The idea was that this should only take 2 weeks to get the new ramp built but I don’t seem  to be getting a long that fast at the moment. Mind you it building these rock (or stone) walls can be quit therapeutic.

 

The main worry I have is if we have enough rocks to finish the walls.

Well we will see how it all goes.

Battle of the bulge

No I´m not talking about our waist lines that is another story..

What I am talking about is the curious bulge that has always been in the wall on the front of the house. It look very much like something inside the wall was pushing it out. So one time while we were working on the lower patio we decided to chip it off and see what was causing this part of the wall to be pushed out, This is what we found Yes you can clearly see that it is a horseshoe. We have found loads of these around the place and it looks as if this one has been placed in the wall while it was being built, possibly for luck. However as this wall can get very damp sometimes the horseshoe has started to rust which is what was pushing the wall out. So we removed it and put it with the rest of the interesting things we find in the garden, there is a spur somewhere…Then we just need to patch the hole and it shouldn't get pushed out again as there is now nothing to push it.

Raising the Ground.

Our house is quite normal on the la Palma in that it is built on a slope, the front of the house is two stories but the back is only one. The lower part of the front of the house consist of two rooms that in the past were used for ether storage or animals. Outside these “rooms” is what could loosely be called a yard, which is about 2 meters wide and bounder by a meter to 1.5 meter drop down to the next terrace.  The problem is that this so called yard is not level in fact it drops by almost 1 meter from one end to the other.

So we plan to level this ground and use the opt unity to construct better access to the terrace below. To do this we need to build up the rock walls and add a ramp.

So the first thing to do is dismantle the rock wall so that we can build the ramp.

Once we have the walls done the we need to bring the ground level up to meet the house and convert this yard into some thing that we can use and that will not break ankles…

Making shapes

Between the kitchen and the rest of the house far years there has just been a rough hole in the wall which has been there since we arrived. well with both sides now finished it’s time to finally put the last piece in place the arch itself. So we built the arch former from ply and small bits of pine. Once the former was complete then came the task of fitting it into the opening. we screwed two boards across the bottom of the opening. Then the arch former was fitted between them and secured in place. Rebar has been put in to give the arch added strength. Note also that the other side has already had the boards fitted. We poured the concrete in and added the extra boards as we went along.

With all the concrete poured in and the boards fitted it was time to cross fingers and pray that we had got the concrete where it was needed. The following day it was time to take of the outer boards and see if we had in fact managed to get the concrete into the right places. As the photo above shows it looks like most of the concrete is where it needs to be, with just a few bits needing some surface patching…

Watering 2.0

Our efforts at using gray water to water our veg has hot been that successful, the first year worked ok , but after that it stopped working. The main problem is the gray water has not been filtered so that it clogs up the drip watering feeds etc.

After some web research and book reading, we cam across a method using plastic pipes with drilled holes to distribute water. These are buried in the veg plots and should provide adequate irrigation.

so we purchased some 20mm plastic pipe and added the holes.

Pipe being drilled.

All the bits ready to be assembled.

The pipe sections are 2m in length and have aprox. 20cm risers added so that they can be berried below the surface.

The water is derived by 16mm plastic irrigation pipes with a tap for each buried pipe. The main problem at the moment is getting all the taps balanced so that each of the berried pipes gets the same amount of water.

So far the system seems to be working but the real test will be through the summer.

The new irrigation system with some very young corn plants…
will it work?

Battery Box fail…….

There I was happily pottering around the house when I heard this sudden crash and thud from somewhere around the house. “Now what has fallen down!!” After 10 minutes of hunting I could not find a thing that had fallen..

Well about a hour later I was hanging up the washing and spotted the following:

What seems to have happened is that the plastic in the storage box that we used to cover the battery 3 years ago has degraded to the consistency of prawn crackers and finally collapsed.

Look out…Look out…..Weather about….

One morning as I was going about my normal  morning routine I walked outside an was suddenly surprise to spot the following. Yes that is a water spout. It’s a little mini tornado that appears over the sea, we do see them sometimes when the conditions are right. They disappear quite quickly and don’t make it to land and also it is very rare to spot one touching the sea. which if you look at the picture below you can see this one does.