Our fourth planning application is in! 

A big moment this week as our Renewables application has finally gone in. We started looking at potential solutions back in December 2020, so this feels like a huge step forward! As we’ve not got much space in our buildings, we’re hoping to build two small external sheds to house some of the equipment required for the air source heat pumps. The heat pumps themselves will be located a little further away from the properties in order to make them more discrete. We’ve also applied for permission to add solar panels onto four of our buildings to help us reduce our carbon footprint and minimise running costs – with the climate crisis and current volatility in the energy market, it seems only right to play our part. We just hope the council agree – given we’re dealing with listed buildings in an AONB it’s a bit touch and go whether they’ll deem our plans suitable – and it would be such a shame if we’re not able to make the most of the sunshine here. 

Generally our whole Renewables experience has been pretty challenging. We struggled to find a company who did heat pumps, underfloor heating AND solar panels together – which we wanted because we needed some expert advice about how best to set everything up to maximise our return (i.e. do we export our leftover solar electricity back to the grid, or do we store in a battery, or do we use to heat water instead). Most companies had very separate departments who couldn’t give us a quote – and a few didn’t get back to us at all. Then we also found some companies wouldn’t give us a solar quote for all our buildings until we had planning permission – which is frustrating because we doubt we can afford to do everything in our planning application. If we plan for less and add more later, we’ll need a new application; if we plan for more and can’t afford to do it all, we think we’ll also need to submit a change to our planning approval. Luckily we know a reasonable amount about the pros and cons of renewable power ourselves because of past jobs – if not though I think we’d be totally stuck! 

Our second win is with our listed cottage planning application. After a bit of back and forth between our architect and the council (we’d submitted the application back in March but the council missed it and we’ve been negotiating a way of keeping our original timelines), we finally agreed on a simplified first application and submitted that at the start of the week. It means we’ll likely need to go back with revisions later, but if the council have recommended this approach then we’re very happy to agree! 

Then on Friday, we took the morning off to visit a kitchen/bathroom showroom with our architect. We visited one kitchen showroom a couple of weeks ago (and are still waiting to hear back from them), but haven’t really given much thought to bathrooms at all yet. We weren’t expecting the level of detail we were asked – soft-close toilet seats, type of shower head, door or screen into the shower, type of shower hose… We’ll be kitting out 6 new bathrooms and 3 new kitchens in the next year, so it definitely requires some thinking about how to make each one just right for the property, and now we know the decisions we need to make, it’s a little easier. As always though – it’s super hard to answer a lot of these questions without knowing how our choices compare to our budget, so we’re going with our ideal first and expecting to work back from there!! 

We also popped into a nearby lighting showroom – which was incredibly exciting!! When we moved into the farmhouse the existing lighting was pretty poor, so we know first-hand just how important decent lighting is. There are so many options that could fit our buildings, although one of our barns is double-height open-plan so will require some clever lighting to make it work. Cue several evenings on Pinterest and flicking through brochures to give us some inspiration!!