Cottage progress

Excellent progress on the cottage at the moment, with the renderers doing a really good job, in every way. The outside render is a self-coloured product, although it will be painted, and looks fantastic!

Now, it's starting to look like a cottage!!  This picture is remarkably similar to a very old picture that I have of my Nanna's first home, in Ireland.  I'll dig it out to compare.


I've been trying to catch up with the mowing around the cottage area while the grass is  dormant, and I'm making steady progress.  I'm also mowing some areas here that have never been mown, ever, and they're pretty tough going.

Another small thing that I've been doing, although it certainly isn't necessary at the moment- is continuing to survey the route of the miniature railway line that I'll be building sometime in the future.  For years I've been 'visualising' the various curves etc, but now I can  see it very clearly, and identify the actual radius of the curve.  All trains have an absolute minimum radius of curve that they can negotiate without threatening to derail, and it's important to make sure that the planned track is nowhere near this minimum.  Mine isn't.  Another important result of this survey is to get nice, even curves of constant radius.  I'm certainly not a trained surveyor, but I invented a simple system to get the job done.  It is prone to various inaccuracies, but it's good enough.  It's based on Pythagoras- you know- the square on the hippopotamus..............

If you measure the deflection at the mid-point of a curve from the straight line connecting the two ends, you can work out the radius using a simple calculator. (square root function).  Here I'm doing the reverse- actually setting the furthest peg, which is 10' away from the middle peg, so that it is the correct radius.  I've clamped a ruler onto the mid peg at the correct deflection, so that when my string line touches the end of the ruler, I know that the peg is in the correct place for the desired radius.

The white pegs will define the centreline of the track.  At this stage this helps me to know what further clearing or earthworks are required to be done before I actually lay the track.  In any case it's fun, and a tiny step closer to construction of the miniature railway at Whistlestop.