Site preparation continues

It feels a lot like we’re working against the clock at the moment. Although we don’t have a confirmed start date yet for the building work, we’re hoping it won’t be much later than the end of October. And that suddenly doesn’t feel very far away, especially with the amount we’ve got to do and the fact that everything seems to take longer than we expect it to.  

So this week we made the most of the good weather to get through the critical outdoor jobs. Our first success was (finally!) clearing through the pile of stones that we built up least year. We now have three dumpy sacks full of smaller stones to break down into hardcore, and a larger pile of large flat stones that we’re hoping can be used to face our new build. Our derelict barn is swept and ready to be demolished and rebuilt! 

We then turned our hand to the shippon. The former dairy had been used for general storage before we moved in, and we’d continued this, from random bits of leftover wood and fence posts, to our incinerator (which we bought before we realised just how much garden waste we’d have), to our peach & nectarine tree covers. So we spent Saturday afternoon carting everything up to our Elizabethan cottage to store it there for the time being. It’s not very far between the two buildings but living on a hill certainly made the job a bit more challenging as we took over-full wheelbarrows up the steep gradient! This was an important job to finish this weekend as we have our ecologist coming on Tuesday to seal it up and discourage bats from hibernating there – much better than having to keep moving them all during the building work. 

This was one job that didn’t take as long as we thought it would – so Sunday we made a head start on our next one – which it turns out will take a LOT longer than we expected! The back wall of the shippon is completely overgrown with huge shrubs and small trees that have grown up over the years, and ivy, brambles and jasmine growing up the walls (and through the roof in places). We need to make enough space to put scaffolding up and to repoint the wall, so spent Sunday outside the front cutting the vegetation back. The area has been left alone for so long it was like a jungle, and much of the ivy has grown into the mortar and behind the stones, which made it impossible to prise it off, even armed with a trowel. It’s a pretty exhausting job, made harder navigating the wide drainage channel that the council have dug along the road as it means jumping across it and carrying all the waste over it. We’re looking forward to next weekend already!! 

We’ve had no progress on the planning front this week, which is getting stressful as it’s now holding things up. We need our renewables application to be approved so we can finalise the electricity site plan with Western Power; and we need the application for the shippon front wall approved before our builder can finalise the build project plan. Our Quantity Surveyor has started reviewing the plans but can only get so far until we know if we’re removing and replacing the shippon wall, or if we need to build around it. We’re keeping our fingers tightly crossed for some good news next week!