A week of A, B, C & D 

This week turned out slightly differently to the one we had planned. It started as expected with an asbestos survey… Because of the age of our buildings, we need to get an asbestos survey done in each one to make sure we’re not putting our builders or future occupants at risk. We already knew we had asbestos tiles on one of the roofs, but we weren’t sure what remained from previous building work. The barns and Elizabethan cottage are mostly empty and so drilling holes in the walls and floors was of no real consequence. But as we weren’t sure quite what access was required and how much dust would be created, we decided to move everything out of the top floor of the farmhouse into our spare bedroom on the first floor, including the beds (we’d been using the top floor as storage and a second spare room). We just managed to squeeze it all in! 

The survey was completed within a day, with mostly promising results. In addition to the asbestos tiles, we have an asbestos roof in the listed cottage, and the remains of a broken-up asbestos concrete roof scattered around the back of the barn (we’d also come across these when digging one of our recent vegetable beds and suspected they were asbestos – luckily very low risk). Our surveyor was incredibly friendly and was very happy to talk us through what he found and the respective risk levels, which was reassuring! 

Our ‘B’ relates to our broken well pump. Typically in the middle of a heatwave, one of the wires shorted after water leaked into the circuit (very weirdly as the joint that shorted is just beneath the ground and nowhere near the water! We’ve never looked in the well before (in fact we had to email the previous owners to find out where the pump is located), and it was fascinating to see the pump and try to haul it up with all the lead weights in it. After several days of using minimal water from the mains, John managed to find a repair person who fixed it within half an hour – so we’re now back to using well water while it lasts. 

This week’s dampener came in the form of Covid, which John finally picked up at the weekend. It’s typical that it happened the week we’d piled both spare rooms and all our boxes into a single room and made it inaccessible! We’d also planned to take a rare day off on Saturday and walk to a nearby village for lunch, but had to cancel that and instead used the time to try and get on top of the garden jobs (we inevitably failed to finish). We’re just hoping that I can avoid catching it so we don’t have to cancel too many more plans – it’s reminded us just how lucky we are to have all this open space as that would have been impossible in London! 

At least we finished the week a bit more positively with our ‘D’. We’ve had a couple of video calls with our architect this week and been given some exciting homework to look through our latest designs and finalise furniture layouts and all the plug sockets and lights etc to feed into our M&E (mechanical and electrical) designs. Not the easiest thing to do socially-distanced and when the wind keeps blowing the paper off the table outside, but it was good to spend a decent amount of time actually talking through everything, instead of snatching an hour here and there in the evenings when we’re both tired. It feels like it’s all starting to come together, even though we’ve still got a way to go yet.