an entrance

the unfinished hut

The hut door is half open. It’s the brand new stable door I’ve almost finished. There’s nothing as permanent as a temporary job, but I’m happy to pause and stick my head outside while standing inside, elbows resting on the half door ledge to approve the industry of the hammering woodpecker - a fellow labourer here.

Things happen slowly at the hut, which is why I’m here, mostly. To be slow. This door I’ve been planning for some years.

When we first came here, the original 1930s door was in place – once a fine thing of craftsmanship, sweetly jointed and painted. In the following sixty years it had taken a beating, though. The lock key had been often lost and the door jimmied open, usually with no expertise. Breaks had been filled with plaster and later with epoxy and painted over. The Yale lock no longer worked. It would need to be replaced.

A year or so later I discovered some new boards in a skip, put there by shopfitters who could see no further use for them. They added up to enough tongued & grooved stoutness for me, one summer’s day, to make a good sturdy hut door with a Z frame support on the inside. No-one throws away good hinges, so I dug out a pair of tee hinges from a job lot of assorted tools and fittings I discovered in a cupboard in a house I once rented in Glasgow. I fitted these to the new door. I had an ancient five inch iron key and its steel lock with brass trim from my once cottage in Glendaruel.

Door and lock at no cost. The lock was too broad for even a double plank, so I made a curving addition to the outside with part of a length of pitch pine salvaged from the basement of a shop in town. Beautiful wood to work with. The offcuts smelled clean and piney and set the stove lighting that evening crackiling with resin. The original door is leaning against the woodshed. I have no heart to burn it and anyway the handle is still good.

But, and slowly, this and that was accumulated for the stable door: a pair of hinges, along with boxes of screws that I took when the owners of the very last ironmongery in Glasgow’s Great Western Road disappeared. I still feel the loss; not just the shop and the owners, but all the hardware that was thrown in a huge skip before I got there. A stained glass window thrown out from a house renovation in Bowling village. Curved oak from a broken chair left for the bin men in a city street. A right angled branch section from Ardnamurchan. A little yellow wood peg to hang keys on. I rediscovered the brass keyhole plate I had thought lost and squirreled it away again.

So it was one bright and cold winter’s day, after maybe ten years, I took the plunge and unhinged the old door and simply sawed it in two horizontally at the middle. The new hinges matched the old, a hole cut in the upper half to take the little stained glass square - one small part of the Bowling window; pitch pine ledges, oak fasteners soon fitted and the new stable door rose from the sawdust and shavings of the old. It had to be a one day job to keep the night’s icy weather outside.

It’s true that the old lock still has to be opened with the key upside down – it’s for a right hand opening door – ours opens on the left; but that’s something to live with and ponder. This spring, I’ll perhaps paint it green, though I don’t yet have the paint.

Meanwhile the woodpecker at least is still at work hammering; now down by the old drover’s cottage at the clachan. I’m happy to listen. And then to listen some more. The sorrel is up now, too, I notice.