Revealed: what we're going to call our House of Straw

The latest part of our Conwy Connections project has really started to shape-up this week.  And now we can reveal what we're going to call the new building that will soon grow next to the Coffee Shop.

This week has seen a load of steel work arrive on site. The only steel in the finished building will be the door and its frame, but to ensure we can build everything safely, we have created a scaffold 'cage' to enable us to work at height.  It starts to give us an idea of the scale of the new building, but of course, it will look much nicer than all these tubes.

The straw was transported from The Crown Estate's farm at Tabley in Cheshire last week, and we're storing it temporarily in a big barn at one of our other reserves.  We've brought some of the bales to Conwy, and that's why there's now a large blue shipping container on Y Maes. That's not too pretty either, but it will mean we can keep it dry and the team can do some carpentry work when the weather is bad.

On Monday, the big deliveries of wood arrived. And we mean big! The beams that run the length of the building are each 12 metres long.  Most of these are made from softwood and ply, but even so it took four people to move each one from the car park to the worksite. And then the mother of all oak beams arrived.  I'm not sure what it weighed, but it took ten of us to move it, and even then it was a struggle. We knew that if we put it down, we'd probably never pick it up again.  Thanks to all the volunteers and staff who came to help  This piece of oak will be the central supporting beam, and it's going to be fun winching it up to roof height!

From the outset, we had a working name for the new building, but we hadn't revealed what we would call it when it's finished.  It's going to be The Lookout (and Tŷ-gwylio in Welsh). We've called it that because it's going to be a great place from which you can see wildlife and enjoy the view. It'll also be a great space for small events that are about getting closer to nature.

In a few weeks' time, we'll start to stuff the roof and floor with straw as insulation, and then we'll stack and pin the bales to create the walls of The Lookout. Within the floor we'll place a time capsule, and we're delighted that so many people suggested items to put in it. We're working through the list to work out what will fit in the box and what we can easily get hold of, and we'll post up a list and some photos in a couple of weeks.  But our first thank you goes to regular visitors Brian and Alice, who after reading last week's blog about the time capsule, gave us their limited edition Golden Curlew pin-badge for the time capsule, and gave us a generous donation too. Diolch yn fawr!