Last week’s blog is a little late as we’ve been in London for the weekend. It was finally the London Marathon! As much as we love living in the countryside, it was so nice to be back in the city, with people everywhere and everything on your doorstep. John obviously got to see far more of the city than Evie and I did, but it was a great excuse to see a few different places, get Evie back onto the tubes and used to people again, and to catch up with family and friends. And John did such a good job – all his training paid off and he managed an amazing time of 3hrs 31 mins 01 seconds, as well as raising over an incredible £3,800 over the last year for JDRF. Thank you to all of you who supported him in the run-up, on the day, and with your very kind donations – it means so much.
Although we were away, we’ve still managed to make some progress on the build preparation front this week. South West Water came to complete our first water survey, checking where our mains supply runs (which isn’t obvious as the supply was originally installed before the farm and land was split up, so our water meter is actually in our neighbour’s field). We’re installing separate water meter connections for each property in case we need to sell them off individually later, so the lady who came to do our survey has spray-painted the best location for each property on the ground, for our builder to check feasibility once we start (look closely at the photos for the blue spray paint!).
The other huge win this week was getting our bat licence through. The various surveys we’ve had done showed we have four different types of bats living within our barns. We’ve already installed four bat boxes around the site, and we’ve built three bat lofts into our building designs. The bat licence allows us to move the bats from their current habitats within the barns and move them into these boxes until their new luxurious lofts have been built. Timing has been everything here – the bat licence covers all our buildings but we need active planning approval for them to be included – so we needed to get our listed cottage application approved before our bat licence came through. Somehow – by coincidence – we managed to get our planning approval last week, only for our bat licence to arrive this week! One more milestone achieved…
We did manage to get a bit of work done on the Monday when we got back – mainly clearly [mostly-rotten] fruit that fell in the orchard over the weekend, and clearing more of our stone pile from the derelict barn. We’ve had to work out a strict job timetable between now and the end of October (when we’re hoping to start build) as there’s so much to clear and get done – especially over Autumn when it’s prime orchard-fruit-preserving time. Fun begins again in November….
Ley Farm Cottages 