Breaking ground!! (well, sort of)

This is the first week that our building project has started to feel like a reality. After over a year of ideas and conversations and drawings, we finally had people and equipment on site to break ground. Ok – we were digging trial pits (to check for foundations) rather than actually starting building work – but that’s better than nothing… 

We had 9 pits dug over two days, both inside and outside our buildings. The purpose was to dig down below the existing walls at various points to see if there are foundations beneath them, and if so, whether they’re strong enough to support the new structures we’re building. Incredibly – once the team cut through the concrete, they dug most of the holes by hand. These were fairly narrow holes up to a metre deep – pretty impressive when you imagine how difficult it is to dig material up! 

Two of the holes (around the back of our third ‘bat’ barn) were located next to the cultivated blackberry plant we inherited. We wanted to keep it so have been busy trying to dig it up and move it before the mini-digger arrived this week – which we just managed in time. It turns out that the blackberry was planted on top of a load of old buried farm machinery, so we have no idea how it grows so well!

It was very exciting to see the mini-digger arrive. Sadly work has been pretty busy this week or I’d definitely have been hanging around the team angling for a trial drive… maybe next time! 

Our structural engineer also attended on Wednesday to check the foundations and also the water table. While we’re still waiting for his formal report to understand what it means from a structural design perspective, his initial feedback sounded like there’s nothing major to be concerned about. The courtyard-side wall of the shippon is the only one without visibly-significant foundations, but as this wall was only added more recently to close the building from the elements and isn’t load bearing, we expected it to need rebuilding. We’re also going to need to replace the iron cantilevers holding the roof up as the way they’ve been added means they’ve rusted through at the bottom. How they’ve not collapsed yet, we don’t know!

The reason we’re so excited about a few holes being dug is that this is the final step before our architect can complete the detailed designs for the buildings, and submit them to the council for approval. Of course – we still have a couple more planning applications to submit (one for our renewable heating/power solutions and one for our listed cottage) but having the first set of detailed designs means we can start to cost out our project and engage builders. And of course – the quicker we can choose a builder, the quicker we’re likely to start! 

We also made progress with our renewables plans. We’ve had two experts visit the site this week to see in person what’s feasible, and where we could site the necessary equipment. We’re following their recommendations to go down the air source heat pump route and are hoping to get council approval for small outside ‘plant room’ lean-tos as well (our third planning application). It’s hard to time appropriately as the renewables companies are used to providing quotes with 30 days expiration, whereas we know it’ll be a few months before we (hopefully) get approval, at which point costs may have gone up too much for us. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it… the main thing is we’re making progress – one week at a time! 

Finally – the public consultation finished on our second planning application this week. We’ve not had any comments or objections raised so far – although we still haven’t had our visit from the council, so we’re keeping our fingers tightly crossed!