100% Floored

The Great Hall is now 100% re-floored! :-) The last remaining quadrant, in the corner with the open Gothic arch, was boarded this week. 

last corner quadrant now re-boarded

I would like to say, "It's great to walk around the room and experience the space.", but in fact scaffolding has already been installed along the west and north walls, restricting one's perambulations.

scaffolding against west and north walls

The scaffolding is to be used to install "temporary" windows in the old window openings, to bring light and hopefully some heat in.

Silver Polishing Room Plastering

Jaymae, the plasterer, and his friend Murdo popped round today to put the final coat on the domed roof of the silver-polishing room at Balintore. Yes, there really is a room in Balintore just for the butler to polish silver.

Jaymae said it was the hardest job he's ever done, as the roof is curved in both directions. Beforehand, he was worried the task might be beyond him, and he only admitted this after completing the ceiling. :-) However, even he is impressed how good the end result looks. He used a trowel with a sponge on it, and a flexible metal trowel to achieve the curve.

final plaster coat on silver polishing room ceiling

The next step is plastering the walls. As ever, top down for plastering!

Curtain Model

One of Ms. Balintore's lesser known rôles is that of curtain model. Friend of Balintore Duncan, who designs, prints and makes curtains for the Landmark Trust, asked if he could tempt her ladyship to model his curtains creations. She was only too happy to oblige.

Duncan wanted to borrow some of Balintore's atmosphere of historic distress, and ironically two of the rooms that were used, have now been restored; so the photos form an unwitting restoration snapshot.

The wolf print curtains were photographed in the old nursery, now largely restored. The design was created for the Landmark Trust property Coed y Bleiddiau, which is the Welsh for 'Wood of the Wolves'.

wolf print curtains

The lion rampant print was photographed in the tank room at the top of the Great Tower.

lion rampant print curtains

The architectural motif print was photographed in Aunt Nelly's bedroom, now restored. And very generously, Duncan has donated the curtains to the room. They look superb in situ, with the walls repainted in the original blue which matches the curtains closely.

architectural motif print curtains

If you would like Duncan to run you up a curtain see his webpage here.

Three-Quarters Floored

As far as putting down a floor in the Great Hall is concerned, we are now three-quarters of the way there. You can see the remaining quadrant that needs boarding by the gothic archway, which once led to the guest staircase. Fingers crossed, we can get the remaining boarding down on Monday.

quadrant still needing to be boarded

The biggest task was clearing away all the scaffolding, insulation and wood in that corner of the Great Hall. And in fact we were able to build-up this scaffolding on the new floor under the north and west windows in the Great Hall, with a view to installing some temporary windows. After 14 or so years of being boarded up, these openings will once again let in light.

scaffolding set-up to install new temporary windows

Sun and Snow

Yesterday, I promised you photos of snow and blue skies. Well, the weather actually delivered today. My accuracy has nothing to do with the fact that I recently worked for the UK Met Office, and everything to do with the fact we are having a cold snap and it snowed heavily yesterday.

My daily constitutional consists of going down the west drive, along the road, and then up the east drive. Here are the photos taken en route:

leaving the castle

looking back at the castle from the east drive

deer prints

the east drive is a fauna superhighway

looking back down the east drive - a single human track!

back at the castle

Walking in virgin snow, illustrates that the castle drives are actually busy thoroughfares for animals and not just the occasional human. By the end of my late afternoon walk, the sun was already coming in at a low slanting angle. I daresay Balintore Castle gets trapped flatteringly twixt blue sky and white ground.

Demi-Floored

Today, Gavin and Gregor reached the half-way mark in flooring the Great Hall. The fiddliest part is installing the insulation, and the actually laying of the boards is the least of the challenge. On reflection, I think it is marginally less than 50%, but it is good to reflect upon progress every day.

Great Hall: flooring progress 16th January 2024

The next task in the Great Hall will be installing temporary windows, so that light can re-enter the room. It has been in darkness for perhaps 12 years, as we blocked off the window openings with sterling board to keep the weather out.

Today, the first proper snow of the winter arrived and it snowed all afternoon. It has been bitterly cold for the last 4 days, so the odds are that the snow will now lie. Jaymae the plasterer got stuck at the castle this evening as the west drive became too treacherous for his vehicle. I set up a bedroom for Jaymae, but fortunately his mother came to the rescue, and Jaymae and I walked down the snow-bound drive so he could get picked up.

Tomorrow, I am hoping to see a white landscape and a bright blue sky. If this does happen, you can rest assured that I will blog the photo here. 

Builders on the Dance Floor

Well, Gavin and Gregor were going to be working somewhere else today but no-one could have been more delighted than I, to find them beavering away on the dance floor when I eventually emerged from my bed this morning.

As the castle has a separate dining room, I can only assume that the Great Hall has witnessed many a ceilidh. This is in addition to its role as a reception area, as it is the first room guests would encounter after the entrance hall. There are exits leading to the toilets, the library, the dining room, the drawing room, and the guest bedrooms - so it is very much like a hub.

In the photograph you will see the swaged netting over the joists, which is used to hold under-floor roll insulation. 

It is a thrill to walk across the floor that has been laid so far. It will be an even bigger thrill to be able to walk around the whole room. Until this is possible, you never quite get the feel for a space.

Great Hall: flooring progress 15th January 2024

Joists Ahoy!

On Thursday and Friday of last week Gregor and Gavin installed the floor joists in the Great Hall.  Things have definitely moved on from the end of last year. You can see the "before" here. The paradoxical thing about floors is that despite the scale of the operation, laying them is unexpectedly quick. In contrast, clearing out the Great Hall in preparation took a full fortnight of effort.

The joists were laid 16" apart in the Victorian manner i.e. roughly 400mm. This contrast with modern floors which are joisted at 600mm centres.

Gregor and Gavin seem to be currently fixated upon creating runways in the castle, which may suggest budding careers in modelling, or perhaps simply an interest in moving materials about more easily. Certainly, the new catwalk in the Great Hall, as of Friday, will enable things to be moved directly between the north and south sides of the castle for the first time.

Great Hall: looking south

The view of the Great Hall below shows that, strictly speaking, only 75% of the joists have been laid, due to the grot in one quadrant of the room. The sub-floor is being constructed of 2400mm x 600mm tongue and groove 18mm plywood - the runway is just the start. This will provide a firm foundation on which to lay the reclaimed strip hardwood flooring. 

Great Hall: looking north

New Great Hall Floor Delivered

The Christmas blog entry described how we are planning to refloor the Great Hall in 2024. Well today the wood for the construction arrived: namely floor joists and Tongue and Groove (T&G) plywood for the sub-floor. Due to the problems of storage (a vast quantity is involved) we didn't want to order this wood, until we knew we were going ahead, and tomorrow is the day.

Many years ago I purchased reclaimed T&G hardwood strip flooring for the top finishing layer of the grand reception rooms - this has been in storage a long time! As the reclaimed flooring is missing tongues in many places, I decided that an additional wooden subfloor is required to stop the reclaimed stuff from falling through.

By the time, I went round the back of the castle to photograph today's wood delivery, Gregor had already got it under a blue tarpaulin, so you will have to take it on trust. :-) You can see the last big pile of rubble and grot dug out of the Great Hall immediately to the left.

New Shades for Old

One unadultered joy of the restoration is finding suitable fixtures and fittings for the castle, and I keep my eyes open at the local auction houses. I reckoned that the table lamp below that came up for sale at Curr & Dewer in Dundee was perfect: a little niche and little bashed around the edges so that hopefully the sale price would not break the bank. Sure enough, I bagged it for a modest £45.

lamp before

I am a stickler for period authentic items, and the presence of exterior wiring (a thin brown fabric-covered cable) along the four branches show the item had started life as a candelabrum before the era of electricity, and was converted near the start of this era.

The animal head masks in the base (dolphin? and bat?) betray a Gothic sensibility. This combined with the dull brass patina suggest a late 19th Century date.

One immediate problem is that there are only two original shades left on the table lamp. These were in very bad condition with holes and whatever the original fabric was: it had gone rigid and discoloured with the heat over the years. Nil desperandum! I managed to locate 4 small matching second-hand shades on eBay for £19.50. Et voila, the re-shaded table lamp is shown below.

lamp after

I still need to make an electrical pass, to ensure the lamp lights up and is safe - watch this space!

Return to the Castle

My friend Andrew gave me a lift for the last leg of my journey from Norfolk (where I spent Christmas with friends) to Balintore Castle. We were both treated to a wonderful atmospheric effect, where the late afternoon sun illuminated the dense fog around us in an orange glow.

Things then got even better.

On the climb up to Balintore, we emerged from the mist into the sunshine, only to observe that there had been a temperature inversion and a sea of mist lay across the bottom of Glen Quharity, where the castle is located.

temperature inversion in Glen Quharity on 5th January 2024

This phenomenon is very rare, and I have observed it only a handful of times since I bought the castle in 2007.  Sometimes, the whole of the glen is covered and the mist comes up to the very edge of the ha-ha, so the effect is one of a sea. However, on this occasion the blanket had settled over just the west end of the glen, and it quickly dispersed after I had taken the photograph.