Category Archives: home improvements

Gang yir ain Gait

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Jack just makes it in time this week – –

The heading translates from old Scots as ‘ Go your own way’ or even ‘do it your way’.

So a gait or gate might be an actual physical barrier but often just a path or street or alley leading somewhere. In my hometown of Dunfermline there’s a street just outside the Norman Abbey called the ‘Kirkgate’ and at the Southern entrance to the town is another one called Nethergate.

Shifting to our backyard but still with a Scottish connection – –

Many of the crofts in the highlands have two areas of ground attached to the house – the ‘in-by’ and the ‘oot-by’. In other words the nearest patch (usually for growing vegetables), and the outer patch where a cow or a pig would be raised.

Our back yard is divided into an in-by and an oot-by. We grow tomatoes in raised beds in the inner part and our chickens live in the outer part where we also grow vegetables (no cows or pigs!). So we have a fence with a gate and that wooden gate was getting pretty old and saggy.

I started by putting two 4×4 posts in and hinging the old gate to one of them, but it still sagged and twisted. So it was time for a new gate to the oot-by! We debated and searched the local hardware stores but everything was very heavy and very costly. Then Wendy suggested using lightweight PVC pipe with plastic netting stretched over.

So that’s what we did. Wendy crocheted the netting onto the pipe frame using special string and we hinged it to the post with gardening twine stapled in place. So far it isn’t sagging but we now have to think how it will be more permanently hinged and how we’ll latch it.

‘We did it our way’ or ‘gaed oor ain gait’ – – –

Happy Landings

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Jack just gets under or over the wire in time this week

I finished my guest post last week about the re-roofing of our house, with a comment about the rain barrel being installed on the upstairs balcony at the back of the place. You access the balcony via a door off the landing at the top of our stairs.

This was clearly foreshadowing for Jack’s Big Adventure on Friday past… I had fitted a valve and attached a hose to eventually have the rain barrel feed our washing machine; Wendy wants to “reduce our footprint.” On Friday morning I went out in the drizzling rain to check that everything was secure and working and not sending rain straight down into the room below. As the balcony door behind me closed, I heard a click.

I had locked myself out!!

Wendy was in Knoxville, I didn’t have my phone and from this angle behind the house no neighbors would see or hear me. The rail on the balcony is fifteen feet off the ground below, which is a concrete slab. Drizzle turned to deluge as I debated what to do next.

I tried kicking the door to no avail. The nearest section of newly installed roof was wet and slippery and it felt unsafe to try again.

Then, I noticed the hose, coiled like a rope at the side of the balcony….

So I wound it around the corner post and let it dangle down, I clambered up onto the barrel and over the rail and then I grasped the hose to lower myself gently down.

A rubber hose in the rain isn’t something you can easily grasp; it’s rather like trying to hold the inside of a banana peel.

As the hose slipped through my grip I remembered my Dad stepping backwards off a painting tressle in the late 1950s and breaking both his ankles. He spent months in hospital recovering and every time it rained he had pain – – Time stretched as the hose slipped through my hands, and I wondered which bones I would break. Fate intervened. Just below was a tub full of empty cans we save for recycling. I broke the tub as the tub broke my fall, but none of my bones broke.

When I told Wendy what happened, she sent a couple of friends to check on me. We had a jolly supper together. You have to admit, it’s a funny story now that it’s safely over.

The moral of the story – always have your phone with you and friends close by!