Our first year!

We can hardly believe we’ve been here for a year now. It was a long and painful road getting to our move date – with our first visit here on 29^th June 2019, then our first offer submitted on 13^th July after a second visit, and then 12.5 rollercoaster months of various offers being accepted and falling through (on both sides). I think we literally held our breath for the final month before we moved, not wanting to plan too much for fear of jinxing the move yet again. 

But we made it – and somehow a year has passed already since we moved in on 23rd July 2020. Sadly our initial expectations about the speed of renovations have proved to be naïve at best – we started off thinking we’d be opening our cottages by this summer; instead we’re entering our seventh month of planning with no conclusion in sight, and certainly no building happening!! We’ve had various additional surveys and historic searches done in recent weeks and so hopefully will have something more to share very soon.  

Things went slightly sour last week when a few days away in extreme heat meant we killed most of the plants in the conservatory. A devastating sight to walk into, and a lesson learnt that we won’t repeat, but we’ve decided to try and cheer ourselves up and celebrate our first year by looking back at everything we’ve achieved. Easy to forget in those disappointing moments and when the job list is never-ending!! 

• Our first job was to tidy up the kitchen garden and shed – clearing out the latter and flattening the floor; repairing the garden wall and replacing the rotting square vegetable beds with back-friendly rectangular ones; 

• We’ve spent a lot of time on the orchard (see last week’s blog) – and, deciding, that we wanted a little more variety, have added three new fruit trees – cherry, nectarine and peach; 

• We’ve built covers for both the new trees and four beds, and then planted up every square inch with some sort of vegetable or fruit. A disappointing find this week – both red and blackcurrant bushes decimated by something – means we’ve added a new tall fruit cage-style cover to our to-do list, although we have until next spring to make it now; 

• We took the greenhouse apart and replaced the rotting sleeper base, cleaning it thoroughly in the process;

• We’ve started to recover various bramble patches around the wilder parts of the garden – our first experiment was a temporary squash and potato bank (which if it works we’ll re-dig and do properly next year), and the second was to create an asparagus bed (now a constant job to remove all the weeds rejuvenated by our digging of the soil!);

• We cleared the bank on the driveway up to the farmhouse and have planted snowdrops, bluebells, and a range of seedlings that we’re still learning the names of (so far – we’ve managed a hosta and a pittosporum!), kindly donated from my parents’ garden;

• We installed a new fence in the wooded area to prevent escaping animals and children – our first experience of stock fencing!! We still have another part of the garden to fence off, although we probably need to wait until we’ve sorted the drainage through the site as the fence is to separate out the drain channel from the garden; 

• We’ve applied various treatments to the front and back lawns to reduce the weeds and help the grass recover (quite successfully) – it may take another year to fully get rid of the clover, but at least it’s a lot better than it was, although now it grows like crazy and needs cutting every week!!; 
   
• We’ve had the experts in to repair the conservatory, which is looking much fresher and cleaner, and in theory won’t get as hot with the new blue-tinted roof. With the fairy lights up and the Madagascan jasmine, it had been a beautiful room to spend the evening in – until the recent extreme heat fried everything in there; now it’s just pretty miserable and sad. We’re exploring ways to keep it cooler in there, while we hope that the jasmine recovers!;
   

• Inside the farmhouse – we’ve redecorated the first two floors almost completely (only the back rooms to finish off). We’re waiting for various planning permissions to be in place before we start on the top floor – but through the rest of the house we’ve replaced almost all the lights to make the house brighter, warmer and more inviting, and calculated that we’ve already gone through at least 100 litres of paint to freshen everything up;

• We made our first jams, chutneys and jellies from our orchard fruit! Definitely an experiment we need to keep up with, as some batches turned out great and others were overboiled and turned out solid! But good fun to try new recipes and get feedback from willing volunteer tasters!;  

• Despite all the jobs on the house and the grounds, we’ve managed to find time to explore the local area and have mapped a load of our favourite walking routes for our guests (with pub stops of course);

• We’ve had 4 bat surveys, 1 ecological survey, 1 tree survey, and 1 topographical survey so far – with 1 more bat survey to go before we’re supposed to have enough for our first planning application. And we’ve installed 4 bat boxes, 5 bird boxes, 4 swallow cups and 5 insect boxes around the site to support our wildlife, with 2 bat lofts to be built into the cottages for the larger bats;

• Our planning permission has now been in for 7 months, having stalled while we try to negotiate an affordable way of including the listed cottage into our planned phasing. We’ve been working with our architect and planning consultant, and more recently a conservation surveyor to come up with a proposal and are hoping to get it back to the council this week for further review. It’s a tough situation as we’re all looking for the same ultimate outcome (the restoration of our Tudor Cottage) – but the council want it doing asap and with enforcement options, whereas we need to take a more pragmatic financially-viable view… sadly we don’t have a limitless pot of money!! 

And while we really have made some changes since moving in, our job list is still overflowing!! Turns out there’s never a quiet moment in the country when trying to redevelop a curtilage-listed site, set up your own business, keep the garden looking nice and fixing various things that go wrong inside… At least we have plenty of support from family, friends and neighbours – for which we’re incredibly grateful!