Feasibility designs and not much else…

A very wet and windy weekend, combined with the aga being out of action all week, means we’ve taken the opportunity for a bit of a break. It’s been hard to get motivated all week – it’s so dark in the evenings that anything outside is ruled out, and we need to fix the lighting inside so the rooms are brighter and more cheerful. We’d normally turn to making chutneys or jams, but with no cooking facilities, even that’s out. 

Instead – we’ve spent time scouring the internet for fittings to go into our newly-painted rooms, and snatched the few dry hours to get on top of the raking again. It’s pretty exciting when we find something that’ll suit our colour schemes perfectly, and we can’t wait to get it all in place (perhaps next weekend will be more productive!) 

In other news – we’ve taken another step forward with the outbuildings! We signed our feasibility designs off this week for the barn and the shippon, enabling the architects to move onto the digitised versions. This also means that our planning consultant can make a start on our planning submission, and our ecologist can make sure we give the bats plenty of space.

We’ve had to change some of our plans to make sure we’re creating reasonably-sized spaces and keeping the old features in place, and we’re phasing the project to avoid doing too much too quickly and running out of money before anything is ready to rent! As such, we’re leaving the listed building to a later phase, and instead of getting a fifth cottage out of our ‘shell’, we’re hoping to turn it into a multi-functional building with storage space for us, a laundry, a space for guests to use, and one of our bat homes (subject to planning permission of course)! A lot to squeeze in, but the current building is a real eyesore with concrete and breeze-block walls, so anything will be better than what we have today. 

We’ve also started to think about potential renewable solutions – being off-grid, we need to find affordable heating solutions for all the buildings – and we’re keen to limit our impact on the environment as much as possible. It’s exciting to think about all the possibilities, dampened down slightly when we see the price tags attached!