The weekend before the July work weekend was one of the hottest in a long time with the temperatures toping 35 degrees in some places. I was a little worried that temperatures that high would stop most work on the site. Thankfully the weather returned more towards the English norm.

On Thursday Steve headed down to the site stopping off on the way to help me load my generator into the car. He then continued on down to the site. Steph, Katy and Alan also headed down to the site on Friday morning and the 3 of them where able to start on the work early.

I got to the site at about half past nine in the evening. Alan had got the fire going and we sat up late drinking wine.

Saturday dawned bright, clear and not as hot as the previous weekend had been. First order of the day was to collect our new lime plaster. This had unfortunately been delivered to the wrong place and was sitting in WildWood’s car park. Two tonnes of it! It was transported over to our site in the backs of Kim’s and Kevin’s Volvo cars. It still took them several trips. We now have a nice heap of bags of lime plaster all ready to go on the walls.

The daubers got straight to work using the daub that had been prepared on Friday. Steph and Bonnie got to work preparing the walls for plastering. This involved splattering a very watery lime plaster onto the daub. As much lime ended up on Steph and Bonnie as on the walls I think! Because of this they where wearing safety glasses and waterproof coats.

I helped Nigel constructing the second ladder platform. The platforms consist of 2 metal brackets made for us by Bryan with planks bolted to them. The brackets hook over the rungs of a ladder and extend out to provide a horizontal bar. Planks are then bolted to this bar. There is one bracket at either end of about 15 feet of plank. So when hooked over 2 ladders you have a horizontal platform to work. The platforms are used for the shingling. One has been in use for a while now but we have been able to get hold of another 2 ladders that means we could build a second one allowing another team to shingle. Nigel and I got the parts of the second platform together and with the help of Kevin put them all together. Mike and Nigel then headed up onto this new platform to start nailing on more shingles.

Having finished helping Nigel I headed over to the clay pile to break some clay. This is more like something that would be given to convicts in Victorian times rather than something done on my weekend! The daub contains quite a lot of clay so breaking and sieving the clay is a never ending task at the moment on the site. I was actually breaking up old daub. Our first attempt at daub was a bit of a disaster. We used a mix of just clay, sand and straw. This cracked as it dried and became loose. We are ripping these panels out and re-doing them using our new, better daub mixture. But the old daub can be smashed up and used in the new. This is what I was doing. Using a metal bucket and a large piece of scrap oak the old daub is pounded up and then sieved. This is back breaking work and creates clouds of dust.

After lunch I went onto mixing the daub with Steve. We quickly make a large quantity and got well ahead of the daubers. We decided to try out and experiment to see if we could use the mixer to break up the old daub. We chucked some rocks into the mixer and turned it on. Old daub was then added to the mixer. Clouds of dust came poring out of the mixer. Steve had had the foresight to invest in some dust masks. We popped these on to protect our lungs. It did work very well though. The tumbling rocks broke up the old daub into a fine powder. This was then sieved. Large bits went back for more tumbling. The dust was a pain though. Both of us where covered in it. We tried holding a wet hessian sack in front of the mixer to keep the dust in it. This made the sack look as if it was on fire.

While all this was happening the wood work team had been hard at work on the front porch again. They finished boarding above the doors and fitted the barge boards. These have been carved and painted by Alan. They look really good (see the gallery).

Saturday was quite hot and dry. This caused problems for the plastering team. The plaster did not want to stick to the walls. To combat this a pressure sprayer was brought to damp the walls down. Hessian sacks where also hung over the new plaster to slow the drying. Lime plaster needs to dry slowly over several days.

We then all retired to the Scout hall for Lemon Chicken cooked by Carol, Di and Peter.

After dinner we all headed back to the hall where we had a campfire. For a change we build the fire outside the hall so we could sit and admire our work! Wine and Beer where drunk and stories where told.

Sunday dawned overcast and drizzling. After breakfast we all headed back to the hall. The light drizzle was actually quite nice and enabled hard work without over heating. It did wonders for the lime plaster which went up much better in the damper weather.

I spent most of the day working with Steve on the mixer making daub and breaking the old daub. The drizzle also helped to keep the dust down from the daub breaking.

One of the tools that I had taken along to the site was a very old belt sander. It is an old Wolf power tool. Very solidly build and easy to service. We needed it so the wood working team could sand the back door. Unfortunately the spring that tensions the belt has become weak over the years. Much as we tried we where not able to stop the belt from slipping. So somewhere I need to get spare parts for a 30 year old belt sander!

Later in the afternoon when my back decided to give me warning twinges so I listened to the warning and stopped work. I decided to head out onto the site with my camera to record what was being done. The results are in my personal gallery under the gallery section. As well as taking the usual shots of people working I messed around with “arty” shots.

By the end of Sunday a huge amount had been done. Many shingles had flown up onto the roof. We estimate that the front of the roof should be fully done by the end of the work week next month. All the shingles look really good. The front porch is coming on and only really need it’s outer doors to complete it. The daubers have finished the back wall high panels. That end of the hall is now completely daubed. Large amounts of daubing where also done on the front end and the back porch. The plastering team finished the first coat on the sections to the right of the front porch. The plastering is going to be a long job (not that there are any quick jobs on the hall). Every daubed wall needs to be plastered inside and out with 3 coats and then a white wash.

This is the first blog entry from me on the Wychurst project.

The major discussion prier to heading down was about the 3 panels of daub that we had broken out during the May weekend. These panels had been done using the older recipe for the daub that turned out to be a bit useless! We broke 3 of the bad daub panels out in May to start replacing them with the new, better daub. Unfortunately we found out a few days before the work weekend that a film crew was coming to the site and they where most likely to want to use the end of the hall where we now had 3 panels without daub. To try and deal with this Steve (the daub master), Steph and Gav headed down to the site for about mid day on Friday. They used this time to get several loads of the daub mixed and ready to use on the Saturday.

When Saturday morning came there was big pile of daub and 3 waiting panels. We got 12 people on these panels and it was amazing to see the speed that the daub went on. In fact the daubing went at such a pace that the mixing team had trouble keeping up even with the daub that had been made up on Friday.

I decided to get out the big strimmer and go round the site inside the Burgh to cut down all the bracken for the filming. We have not kept the growth down properly this year and it really needed clearing.

The woodworking team started to board in the area on the front of the porch above the door.

At the same time the palisade team attacked the back bridge (NBMB) and started laying oak planks to widen it. The extra beam had been laid about 18 months previously but no one had had the time to lay the planks. They used the off cut timbers that did not get used for the palisade.

Saturday was very hot. The Burgh is surrounded by trees and now the bank with the palisade on it. This cuts the amount of breeze at ground level to almost none. But despite this all the teams got on with their various jobs while the children ran amok and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

By lunch time the daubers had mostly finished the 3 panels. This is as much daubing as normally gets done in a weekend! Steve, Steph and Katy stayed at the Burgh during lunch to mix more daub. Gav and I then relived them after lunch so they could go and eat. This way we where able to keep up with the daubers. But the daubers where running out of wall to daub. Another of the bad panels was broken out on one of the end walls of the long hall. At the same time Gav and I put up a scaffolding tower inside and outside by one of the window sites. This allowed one of the daub teams to start on some of the higher level panels. By the end of the weekend they had daubed all around the window area.

The planking was also going ahead for the porch although this proved to be troublesome.

By the end of the day huge amounts of work had been completed by the various teams.

After a cleanup everyone headed down the pub for a meal paid for by the film crew. We then retired to the long hall to sit round a fire. I got out my camera and did some more playing with long exposure stuff. These can be seen in the personal gallery section.

Sunday dawned hotter than Saturday had been. We all got into our early medieval clothing and headed to the Burgh to meet the file crew. There started a long hot day in front of the camera. Thankfully the film crew where very good. They had brought lot of water and sunscreen with them and where mindful of the dangers of working in such heat (it was over 30 degrees centigrade which for England is a lot). They also knew what they wanted and how best to get it minimising the number of takes we had to do.

Because every one was dressed in their period costumes it was a perfect opportunity to take photos. Many cameras where evident and I took some 500 photos over the weekend most of them on Sunday.

The filming was for BBC2 and will be shown in the UK sometime in January 2007. The film work earned the project about enough money to plaster the long hall walls.

All in all a very productive, though hot, weekend.