Festive DIY.

This is the one we have been putting off. About 10 years ago the old oil boiler chuffed a cloud of soot up the cellar stairs which rolled on a ball of warmth to the top of the house and settled in the lightwell. We gave it a clean 5 years ago and put the slight dinge it left behind down to authentic and atmospheric Edwardian patina. The problem was that from the back door the corridors connect the laundry room to the kitchen to the front hall, then go up a flight of stairs and from the housekeepers room at the end to the door to the front landing and gallery, and then up again to the attic door through a huge square lightwell that is 2 stories high. There is probably the same surface area in those non-rooms as there is in a 2 bedroom house. Plus lots of pictures (all with little moustache swags of cobwebs behind them), mirrors, and all the little holes from previous pictures and mirrors.

So me and mum took it on (partly for want of something to do indoors in what is always a quiet stretch mid December) and after a marathon 2 days the difference it has made is extraordinary, the backstairs is now so clean and smart I don't want to put any of the pictures back up.

Christmas and New Year.

Due to a change of plans on our part we now have both Christmas and New Year available at Inshriach House, advertised at the reduced price of £3500 per week but seeing as it it getting late in the day you could find us open to a sensible offer. Seeing as The Times had us as one of the 20 best places for Hogmanay last week you could be getting yourself a bargain.

Especially as the ski area has opened today and the view from the kitchen window this morning looks a lot like this.

George Clarke's Amazing Spaces.

And in late breaking news I'm told that the episode of George Clarke's Amazing Spaces that features the Beermoth is going to be showing on the 20th November at 8pm on channel 4. Or catch it in your own time on 4OD.

Next years buildings.

There are moves afoot to choose next year's building project. Our friend Hannah is drawing up plans to convert the steading, build a barn / studio, convert the squash court and to build a new / reconstituted Victorian bothy in the farm. One of them will emerge as the favourite, the precise combination of disposable funds, long term benefit, helpful friends and available materials being the deciders.

Anyone who fancies coming round here on a rainy afternoon and helping me pull nails out of this acreage of oak parquet would be very welcome. It came out of Cafe Mambos (under new management and being refitted) and it looks like there might be just enough to do the ground floor of a squash court....

And if anyone is in the market for an MGBGT we seem to have a surfeit.

The other bothy project.

There has been a years break on sorting out the other buildings at Inshriach. This one, known as the bothy has at various times been the estate laundry, the workshops, ski sheds and assorted gun and chimney brush cupboard, then it became a summer house, occasional music studio and a house again, by which point, externally at least, it was in a bit of a state. The back half of the building was painted with modern vinyl paint and on the front the limewash was worn thin in the places you wanted it thick and caked up in the mouldings and the details. Harry and I did a good go at taking the paint off the back half this time last year, at the same time removing all the smashed up gutters from this and the two adjoining sheds. The gutters got painted and now the rentals are quiet for the winter it's time to get back on it and sand and scrape the rest of the building. I dont recommend sanding whole buildings, least of all ones with fiddly battens all over them, but after 4 days solid it's finally making progress. The picture above shows the back half mid sand and the picture below is the front after the first coat of lime paint (a few more of those to come), and with some of the gutters finally back up.

Mr and Mrs Calmac.

Huge Congratulations to Calum and Rhiannon on their wedding last weekend. Not everybody can lay their hands on The Horndog Brass band, most (sorry - all) of the Banana Sessions, a fine wee ceilidh and such a lovely bunch of folks.

This great picture is by Ingrid Mur who also took a lot of brilliant photos at the various Insider festivals.

The wedding yurt.

Its been all hands on deck today to put up the 42ft yurt we are using for Calum and Rhiannon's wedding. Its the 4th time we have used it, it's always absolutely spectacular (especially now with the autumn colours around) and if you want to use it get in touch with Paul at Red Kite yurts (for he is a lovely chap).

Lloyd Kahn featuring the Beermoth.

If you happen to be a fan of oddball, handmade accommodation then finding this email from the author of the definitive tome on the subject (Home Work, a book which in no small way influenced the truck and which happens to be sitting next to me on this table) is a bit of a treat.

Hello,

How can I get in touch with the builder/owner of the Beer Moth Truck for possible inclusion in our next book?

Please see our website for the type books we do: http://www.shelterpub.com

Best,

Lloyd Kahn

Red Review the Yurt.

Here is another nice piece of press, this time from Red Magazine who came a few weeks back to stay in the yurt.

The Great British Adventure

Congratulations to Ed and Jenna, the winners of Canopy and Stars Great British Adventure competition. You can follow their progress as they continue round the country by going to this link.

When they were here they stayed in the Beermoth, had this classic MG courtesy of Bygone Drives, visited the Cairngorm Reindeer herd, went river tubing with Full on Adventure, had an outstanding meal down at The Old Bridge Inn, did a Sunday afternoon wood carving course here with Woodentom then happened to overlap with my birthday / our friend Hazen's visa expiration party and got properly involved with some committed late night boozing at the whisky bar out in the field.

We wish them all the best with the rest of their adventure (and hope they have recovered) and would like to say a massive thank you to everyone mentioned above for being so game and making this happen.

The woodland workshop.

Over the last 2 days Tom has been out in the woods running the first rustic furniture making course under the (temporarily covered) cruck frame workshop. The next course is mid September but we can arrange either one day (basic skills, spoons, bowls etc) or more complicated courses on demand, its about £50 per day and it can be for as few as 2 and as many as 6 people at a time.

Take a look at the Woodentom website or his facebook page for more details and give him a shout to arrange something.

The Beermoth goes international.

A few months back Marie Clare Maison got in touch from Paris asking if they could come up to do an interiors feature on the Beermoth. Implausible as that my sound it happened this week, the photographer making her way from London, the editor all the way from Paris. The truck behaved, the weather behaved and we wait with fashionably baited breath for the results. An added bonus was that the Bothy Project (which they hadn't seen in their research) was ideal for a small spaces feature that comes out in February and they went away with an iphone crammed with photos of the house for further inspiration.

Balancing out the Interior features with some holiday press, Red magazine were here to review the yurt on Monday and that spun itself out into another feature on the estate for the sustainable lifestyle magazine Sublime. In the meantime look out for the next edition of Jocks and Nerds magazine who swung by to take my portrait a month ago and until that comes out here is a review of the yurt from TNT magazine, and another little number on the truck, neither of which I had noticed coming out. My favourite in the burgeoning press folder is this elegantly constructed analysis of the of the truck from Architizer, if only I had I known I was breaking free from my structural and cultural fixities I might have put on a decent shirt.

And then it's back to telly land. Of which more later.

George Clarke's Micro Designs.

Last weeks most amusing distraction, apart from ragwort pulling, was a day filming with George Clarke the Restoration Man. He is making a series on Micro Designs which will be aired later this year. The Beermoth is the focus of this episode and seeing as we had a beautiful day and lots of (I thought) witty banter, it ought to be pretty entertaining. It also brought to light a few other projects we are considering that he would be keen to cover - of which more later...

Heritage Commercial

There's a lot of motorised activity going on down on the farm this month and the Beermoth is once again setting the PR pace. Here she is with a 4 page feature in this months Heritage Commercial magazine. The niche nature of the publication will be offset later this month with a more fashion / interiors related piece and her first TV appearance.
She has been joined today by this very pretty Jaguar XK140, the folk staying in the 'moth have driven it all the way from Hampshire in a 1950s motoring pilgrimage.

Bygone Drives.

Over the last few months our friends at Bygone Drives in Aviemore have been on my kind of buying spree. Do you need a Bentley, a Range Rover or a convertible MG while you are holiday? Of course you do.

The Bedford is back.

Regular readers, of which I'm sure there must be at least one, will know that I'm a sucker for a motorised project and may have already met this 1962 Bedford. Last year it starred in a movie called 500 miles north, in which it broke down a lot between Warwickshire and here. It's very pretty but under the skin is a terribly botched conversion to Ford power. In order to finish the film in a few weeks we have to finish the camper, remounting the engine, fitting more suitable steering, rewiring it and generally making it nice. Hence Jimmy Whitmore is here, alternative fuels whizz, ace fabricator and the only mechanical person I know who would be totally unphased by the horribleness of the task. I have been known to speak too soon, and with the house rented out and the new estate office conversion at a midway point there are certainly more important things to do, but with Jim about a few of the inhabitants of the Inshriach abstract motoring stable may find their way back on the road over the next fortnight.

Back to business.

That being the serious business of gardening. The vegetable gardens were a little neglected in the run up to the Insider and by July the dock was head high, the nettles and ground elder fully rampant and the mint and currants and last years new fruit trees almost invisible behind deep grasses. Nothing that a couple of weeks attached to the strimmer and garden fork can't sort out. Out of the 40 odd beds in the gardens we did at least manage to turn and till and rake the first 5 early in the year and get plug lettuces, purple broccoli and some peas in and now we are planning to turn and plant the rest as we go, with any luck leaving us with a bumper crop of hot leaves, rocket and other goodies late into the season.

The Insider.

Before life returns completely to normal here is a lovely memory from the Insider courtesy of the Paul Simon Treatment.

The Insider Olympiad.

That was a pretty special weekend of sporting shenanigans. Huge thanks to all of those who made it happen, the streams of volunteers, the lycra clad musicians and the many professionals beavering away behind the scenes to make it the best Insider yet. Gold medal for remembering that it's a good idea to have lovely photos of such an event goes to Louise Bichan and just to proves that we weren't making it all up here is a review from the Scotsman and Northings courtesy of Sue Wilson. Everyone's a winner.

One week until the Insider.

Insider 2012 is nearly upon us, day tickets have pretty much sold out and weekend tickets are selling fast so if you want one get on the website and snap one up. At this rate there will be no tickets available on the gate but we are planning on keeping back an allocation of day tickets for anyone who can prove that they have a PH22 postcode (ie utility bill and ID). In the meantime here is the full line up to whet your appetite for next weekends sporting shenanigans.

Harry and Sophie.

Slightly belated Congratulations from all of us to Harry and Sophie who got married a few weeks back, many of you will know them for spending 18 months living in the dogshed here, helping us out and being generally lovely.

The Beermoth is back.

My intention, much to peoples surprise, is to keep the 'moth roadworthy, improving it, replacing bits and generally making her generate the money for her repairs by renting her out. After our marathon journey north last year there were a few issues, the lack of brakes being the main one, the fact that she was running like a dog being another. It took a day (in October last year) to figure out how to jack it up, then 5 minutes to find out I didn't have any spanners big enough to get the wheel nuts off. To the rescue came Mechty and Graham and she was jacked up and stripped down, revealing leaking cylinders and ruined shoes.

First mission was brake linings and this is not a case of popping down to Halfords, they are absolutely enormous. Some super sleuthing on the part of CV components in Inverness tracked some down the right size and they rebuilt the shoes. Stage 2 was the cylinders. New seals were no problem but life is never so simple and the cylinders ended up being machined out and treated to stainless steel liners and pistons so the back brakes, at least, should now outlast the truck. I also tracked down spark plugs, made up new HT leads, rebuilt the distributor and fiddled about with the timing until she was running a bit better. All this ran a bit over time so she was three weeks late into rental, thanks go to the boys for swinging back in and helping stick her back together and to everyone who has been so understanding about either being postponed or put up in the new bothy.

On the cosmetic side Aaron Sterritt made up a new chopping board and a little oak cupboard for inside, the bed got new rails, the floor had a coat of nice osmo wax oil and after a dozen attempts at matching the colour the back wall had a coat of paint. The only sacrifice I am going to have to make in the name of practicality is that the Rayburn is going to have to go. It's so beautiful and spot on date wise but even for the moth it is just too heavy hanging out the back like that so in the workshop at the moment sits a lovely (and still not insubstantial) Quebb stove awaiting a scrape and a lick of paint.

Rest assured the Rayburn wont go to waste.

A film from the archive.

While uploading some new videos for the Insider I found this video I made back in 2008, not long after we first came here and when were mid way through the big redecoration. Its set to a Session A9 tune and was made up of stills taken from the kitchen window, 900 of them in all, with a view a lot of you will find familiar. Now, 4 years later, Session A9 are headlining for us on the Sunday night at the Insider. Who would have thought it?

The Insider.

Apart from the sport (a subject we know little about and are not taking at all seriously) the Insider is getting organised this year. Rather than leaving everything to the last minute, and knowing that May plus June equals weddings, we decided to get on with extending and cladding the whisky bar. It's another skip dive spectacular. The larch shingles are offcuts from the bin at Russwood, the structure of the bar is old pallets clad with ends from Alvie sawmill (those are now into their third incarnation), Balvenie distillery donated a van load of barrels a couple of years back, the gate (not shown yet here) was from the tip and even the speed rails and shelves are made up from pallets, the only parts that money changed hands for are the battens at the back, a few posts and a lot of screws.

If anyone has a pile of old scaffolding boards or joists or floor boards or pretty much any useful old timber I would gladly take it off their hands, ideally in exchange for cider come festival time.

More press.

The press has found Inshriach recently and it seems like every weekend another feature pops out. Just this last month we have had an interiors feature on the main house in the Scotsman (accompanied by a lovely article about the whole estate) then Easyjet jumped in there with this piece on the estate and how we came to be here, then last weekend the Guardian ran this about the bothy and both the Independent and the Spectator ran stories about the Beermoth. Since Christmas the truck has appeared on Yahoo.com, American Express Traveller, Conde Nast Traveller, Red Magazine, Woman magazine, The Mail, the Metro, The Sun and Country Life. Her merry trample through the media is not over yet. Next week she comes home as yet another journalist arrives, this time covering the story on behalf of her truest fans. Only absolute afficionados would be count themselves among the readers of Classic Commercial magazine.

Woodworking courses.

There's another woodland oddity coming together at Inshriach. Woodentom is building a cruck framed workshop to move the carving and green woodworking courses out of the farmyard and into our oak woods, its going to be a beautiful secluded little spot. With any luck it will be finished in time for a suitably ungrand open day next weekend.

Here are some provisional dates for 2012 but Tom can arrange courses pretty much on demand if there is enough of a group interested. Contact him for prices and availability, woodentom1@gmail.com.

31st March - Open day.
12th May - Stool Making.
15th - 16th June - Insider Festival.
28th - 29th June - Shave horse making.
5th August - Fun day.
23rd - 24th - Rustic furniture.
13th October - Spoon carving.
27th October - Bowl Carving.
8th / 9th November - Rustic furniture.

There is also the coracle making course on the 25th - 27th May, you can read more about this here.

More rubbish sheds.

Another part of our plan to keep Inshriach sustainable involves taking as much of our firewood as we can from the estate. Last year we reckon around 15 tons was fed into the house and perhaps half of it we chopped and split ourselves. Storage is the problem, laying down the wood in suitable conditions to season properly. With the yurt, the beermoth, the house and two bothies all anticipating pretty strong levels of occupation it was time to get recycling.

The top shed was easy. 5 offcuts of wriggly tin from the tip, 5 pieces of wood, some screws and three half pallets. The bottom one was the result of a pile of used 4 inch posts and 6 more sheets of salvaged tin sitting dangerously close to each other and getting in the way for a few months. I'm not quite sure what to clad it with but something will no doubt appear.

Now we need to go out and chop some logs.

Coracle Building at Inshriach

With the help of coracle master builder Peter Faulkner, basket maker Edmund Howan and Henry Fosbrooke we are running a 3 day Spey coracle building course at Inshriach between Thursday 25th May and Sunday 27th May.

All the willow for the basket work, a pre cured hide for a cover, softwood to make the seat and blanks to make paddles are provided. You will need to find your own accommodation and food but camping can be made available at Inshriach and we can chip together for communal meals if we like.

The cost per coracle is £450 including all the materials (one would expect to pay at least £500 to buy a ready made coracle) and we reckon on making 6 coracles over the weekend so if you can find someone to share the work (and the coracle) the cost would be £225 per person. Once they are finished we can take to the spey to see if anyone can stay upright.

Please email walter@inshriachhouse.com or call 01540651341 for more details.

Good press and great photos.

There has been a run of press interest in Inshriach recently.

There are articles in the pipeline for both Easyjet Magazine and The Scotsman about Inshriach as a whole and The Guardian are here to review the Bothy Project as I speak. The Scotsman sent John Paul Photography along to bring their article to life and being a total gent he went some way beyond his remit of 8 photos, he ended up taking pictures of the whole place and letting us use them. You can see the full set on our flickr page but it means that for the first time I have a decent picture of the newly decorated big drawing room and can give you a teaser of the outside of the bothy...

New tidy drive.

The first picture was taken after I had peeled up the layer of earth and turf that had built up over the decades down the side of the house, the second after I had spread out 4 tons of nice pink granite gravel from the quarry across the valley. This ought to mean a lot less mud stomping in through the back door and it makes for somewhere nice to put loos if we have a wedding. The final step in the tidying down the side will be to get rid of the now redundant oil tank in the foreground. And then get a ladder out and finish painting the soffits.

Insider 2012 - The Olympiad.

Bar ironing out a few teething problems with our new renewable system it's back to business as normal, which means the abnormal business of organising the Insider Olympiad is underway. We have nearly got our heads round yet another permutation of the site layout and our website is about to get up and running (no pun intended).

And relax.

It's a relief when the first rental of the year arrives because it marks the end of a three month DIY binge on the big house. It's more of a relief when those people have been here before and know the ropes and it's even more of a relief when you have run it as close to the wire as we just have.

Yesterday there were 3 roofers, 3 plumbers, 2 electricians and Richard and Phil from Greenflame here, the cellar was in bits with rubble and wire and bits of plumbing and holes all over the place. It seemed all day like luck was on our side. While the rest of the country froze up, here in the north of Scotland it was mild and the earth defrosted enough for us to fill the trenches. By 9pm we had persuaded the boiler to speak in English rather than German and we were on the last of the wiring. Then it got troublesome. The new system could run a footballers mansion and persuading it to just cope with our Edwardian heating and a pair of new cylinders was the first hurdle. Then it transpired we had blocked a port in the hopper by filling it before attaching the vacuum pipes. It wasn't until 1.30 this morning that it finally opened its valves, filled itself up and kicked into life. We still have to install the heat monitors and wire in the immersion back ups, add more controls, insulate the pipes, work out how to go about centrally heating the bedrooms and tidy up the wiring before its officially commissioned but that can all wait for another day. It's on, hot water comes out of the taps and the tangy petrochemical smell that accompanied the old system is gone. Phew.

Inshriach goes sustainable part V.

Today has felt pretty calm after the tempest of trades that have been here the last few days. Only me and mum and Dean the plumber were on the job today. The cellar looks more and more like a boiler room, two new 300 litre tanks found their way down there and Dean has been stitching it all together. I fed the vacuum pipes into underground electrical conduit to give them some protection from the roots of the tree and any vehicles passing that way, then laid them into their trench. It would have been good to finally fill that in but the piles of earth that came out of the trenches are frozen solid.

Inshriach goes sustainable part IV.

These renewables updates are coming thick and fast this week, and they need to, with 4 days and counting until our first rental it looks a lot like we are still spot on schedule (not that we ever made a schedule).

Today was a beautiful frosty morning. We kicked off with the vacuum ports and internal pipework being installed in the hopper so the last braces and the lid could go on. Then Brian from Donside Slating, probably the least vertigo afflicted person I know, arrived with a little tracked scissor lift to get the chimney liner in, Graham came back and hacked some more holes to help the liner through, landed the boiler in its final position and fitted some of the heating pipework and the circulation pump, then Alastair and James (lovely sparkys we adopted from the solar install) popped by this afternoon to see what wiring would be needed. As I write this, just after dusk, a huge tipper truck is rattling 5 tons of pellets along a pipe into the new hopper.

Last night hit minus 9 and with no heating, big holes in the cellar walls and no door between the cellar and the house there were bitter draughts racing through the place. Tonight the door is back on, its a mere minus 4 (and falling) and the holes are stuffed with rockwool so now we can get away with lighting a fire and collapsing in front of the telly.

Inshriach goes sustainable part III.

Today was the turn of Greenflame Technology to add their wisdom to our sustainable situation. It's been a nervy weekend, I checked the tech on the boiler on Saturday and gave Richard from Greenflame a massive fright by finding out that our unit was 10cm wider than the cellar stairs. Further frantic internet searches and phone calls to the manufacturer and we reckoned we could strip enough off it to squeeze in, perhaps with as little as 2cm to spare. It still weighs well over half a ton even after stripping off anything shiny, delicate or electrical so we borrowed a block and tackle, ran a strap along the corridor and across the utility room, passed it out the window, tied it onto a forklift and then gingerly tipped the boiler down the stairs.

Once it hit the deck Richard and Phil set about figuring out which bits had come from where, Marcus MacBean the blacksmith came to weld extensions onto the old pipework and Graham the plumber and 2 guys knocked the necessary holes through the foundations of the house for the pellet feed. In the meantime anyone who was free helped me bolt the big silver space hopper together (the first delivery of pellets arrives tomorrow), mum made soup and sandwiches and by the end of today we seem to be bang on with what is certainly an ambitious schedule. At this rate the folks renting Inshriach this weekend will have hot baths.

The Beer Moth hits the press.

The 'moth has really captured the public imagination. Last week it went in the Sun travel section, this week I'm told it is in Country Life. Conde Nast Traveller featured it first, then over the last month or so it has picked up its petticoats and gone a trampling across the net. Among the many blogs it has popped up on the one I'm most proud of has to be Lloyd Kahn's . Lloyd wrote the absolutely fabulous books 'Shelter' and 'Home Work', full of handmade huts, shacks, yurts, treehouses and trucks, books which in no small way inspired the conversion in the first place.

Now the lonely planet want to come to stay and a press agency called up for high res pictures so you can expect to see it out and about some more over the next few months. Right now it's up on blocks in the farmyard. Once the renewables situation on the big house is under control I'm going to rebuild the brakes and get it running spot on for whatever adventures 2012 may hold.

Once that's done it will be available to rent again through Canopy and Stars.

Inshriach goes sustainable part II.

The next round of the sustainable circus got underway this week. Unfortunately we discovered that our old cylinder was insulated with Aconite, the sort of asbestos you dont really want to play with. That meant lab tests, a 14 day notification to the HSE, the whole cellar being placed in a negative pressure airlock, acres of plastic sheeting, double bagging, a decontamination unit on the drive, funny suits and high vis jackets, 2 inspections by a third party and another chunky bill. The guys who dealt with it, NJS, were dead professional (and as reasonable as could be expected on our finances), they stuck to their price even when the decon unit froze and the the job overran by a day and now we are sat here with no boiler, no tanks and no heating in preparation for next week, when the new system arrives.

A gigantic meccano set turned up during all this which is to be the new wood pellet hopper. It's modular so there are dozens of bits of stainless steel and fittings, bags of bolts and mastic, and no instructions. A boysy weekend of head scratching and spannering awaits.

Inshriach goes sustainable.

Phase 2 (or is it phase 5) of our winter of renewables is now underway with the wood fired boiler. The slab for the hopper went in before Christmas but the blocks had to wait until everyone left and we had a day that was warm enough. True to form it was fully dark before it was finished and the morning revealed blockwork only a mother could love.

Then we needed a trench to the house through which a vacuum transfer system will draw the pellets, up the bank, past a tree, shallow at the hopper and at the house and deep where it crests the bank. This again was all good until I hit the foundations of the house that sat here before Inshriach, a Victorian farmhouse then known as South Kinrara. 5 foot of beautifully dressed stone were firmly mortared in my path. The trench got wider and wider as the blocks gradually worked free. Just outside the foundations I hit a seam of earthenware and old bottles, builders rubbish perhaps. I think I broke some with the spade before realising there were intact bits, then I came over all Tony Robinson, fished out these lovely little pots and chiseled the last bits of wall out of the way.

Next week we decommission the old boiler and strip the tanks, then have a mad rush to get the rest installed in time for the first booking.