{"id":20790,"date":"2023-04-03T16:35:33","date_gmt":"2023-04-03T14:35:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=20790"},"modified":"2023-04-03T16:39:40","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T14:39:40","slug":"reflections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/reflections\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Living in my caravan for the last 21 months has been a miserable, depressing and isolating existence that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. But the last few weeks have been absolutely ghastly. Right at the very beginning I invested in two gazebo-type tents called ‘tonnelles’. These were planned to perform two functions, namely to house furniture that I’d otherwise have had to pay for to put into storage and to provide space where I could continue entertaining and meeting with my friends during the summer months while not otherwise having the space to do so.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately I lost one of them almost immediately, destroyed by high winds shortly after I’d erected it and then had to leave to go to England, and had to replace it by yet a third one. The two which I then had performed well in both roles and it was a source of sadness to me when the weather deteriorated at the end of the summer and the fun side of things had to wind down. Things then became more serious and the emphasis moved to just finding ways to defend the two ‘tonnelles’ from the weather which became ever more threatening to their very existence week by week.<\/p>\n

Having lost one of them already to high winds, in the autumn the second of the first two that I’d bought suffered serious roof damage from a wind gust. Luckily I had kept the roof covering from the first one and although it had also been damaged during the fist incident, it was comparatively unnoticeable and I was able to swap it over. I then had to keep a weather-eye open and if any strong winds were forecast I found that the best way to mitigate against them was either to partially unzip all the side curtains of both ‘tonnelles’ to allow the wind to pass through them or, in extreme cases, to fully open the curtains and tie them securely to the structures’ support legs to stop them being ripped.<\/p>\n

This worked well up until a few weeks ago when we had a day of high winds culminating in a final tremendous gust that had a devastating result, getting under the roof and ripping the guy ropes of the second of the first two ‘tonnelles’ that I’d originally bought out of the ground, turning it completely over and smashing it against the side of my caravan. It took me a minute or so to get out as the ‘tonnelle’ was jammed up against the caravan door and when I eventually did I witnessed a scene of total disaster.<\/p>\n

It was raining, the wind was still blowing with enormous force and the ‘tonnelle’s’ curtains were still being blasted around in all directions. The roof was still on but I could see that several of the structure’s metal tubes were either badly bent or broken and that there would probably be little hope of saving it. Nevertheless, I managed to struggle to remove its curtains and also eventually its roof covering and I decided to leave the framework where it was, upside-down outside my caravan until I had time to make a better inspection to see if I might be able to repair and maybe save it. Unfortunately it’s still there to this day in the mud in front of the caravan.<\/p>\n

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But that wasn’t the end of things. As a result of the above experience, I decided that it would be a good idea to tie down the last of the three ‘tonnelles’ still standing with heavy rope, which I did while still maintaining my policy of partially unzipping or fully opening and tying back its side curtains whenever strong winds were forecast.<\/p>\n

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This worked well as before but even so, was still not enough to appease the weather gods who decided to send in another wave of storms and high winds over the last week or so.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the last ‘tonnelle’ is of a design which includes a top roof vent which has its own fabric cover (see images above and below). It’s attached by the four rods forming the vent’s framework merely sticking into its four corners and stretching it into place and I’ve always had my concerns that this would not be enough to resist any really strong winds. <\/p>\n

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Unfortunately these were proved right when during storm-force winds last week the two corners of the fabric that were taking the greatest battering finally gave up the ghost and allowed the rods to rip right through them.<\/p>\n

I managed to save the cover before it was eventually either blown away or totally destroyed and had to decide what to do next. With the side curtains tied back and the roof vent cover off, it’s almost like having nothing at all covering the ‘tonnelle’s’ contents, which of course is the case for the contents of the ‘tonnelle’ that blew over and which are now standing in the open air, albeit with a plastic tarp over them. This isn’t too important as the items affected are mainly garden furniture that would normally be outside anyway, or garden chairs that are fairly weather resistant.<\/p>\n

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But this is not so for the contents of the last ‘tonnelle’ for which the implications are far more serious. This is because thinking that it would be weather-proof enough, I decided to store the interior doors of my house in it until the floor-levelling screed has been laid in my house and they can be taken back inside and mounted in their frames. I took the precaution of wrapping them in yet another new waterproof tarp but I’ve no idea up to now whether this will be enough to protect them because at times when the ‘tonnelle’s’ top vent cover was off and its curtains were tied back, they were being directly lashed by the strong winds and heavy rain. <\/p>\n

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I could do nothing about it until a couple of days ago when I repaired the ‘tonnelle’s’ vent cover by hand-stitching some short lengths of strong tape over the rips in its corners. Up to now the repairs have held against the strong winds that we suffered for two days up to yesterday, and for now the curtains are also all back in place. So if I’m lucky, the rain holds off and the floor screed goes down soon (I was told it would go down during last week) I might get away with the doors not getting wet and warping. If that happened it truly would be a huge disaster.<\/p>\n

But in any event, I am utterly sick of living in my old caravan. The upside is that it has saved me a lot of money, literally thousands of euros, that I’ll be able to spend on the house and its contents, but it has been a soul-destroying existence the cost of which has been high both spiritually and emotionally. I can’t wait to get out and back to living a civilised life surrounded by four walls and a proper roof and although knowing what I now do, I’d do another house-build project, I don’t think I could ever face living in a little caravan again. Certainly not for the best part of two years, anyway \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Living in my caravan for the last 21 months has been a miserable, depressing and isolating existence that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. But the last few weeks have been absolutely ghastly. Right at the very beginning I invested in two gazebo-type tents called ‘tonnelles’. These were planned to perform two functions, namely to house … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20790"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20820,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20790\/revisions\/20820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}