Excitingly, we’ve finally made our first major purchase of materials for our new cottages (so far most of the money we’ve spent on the new buildings has been on surveys or plans or people’s time – all things that cost money but that you can’t actually touch). It feels like months that we’ve been considering our options, so we’re really pleased that this week we put an order in for our first three bathrooms, to go into the top floor of the farmhouse and then two in our new home. After all the hassle we had earlier in the year with companies not getting back to us, we decided to buy from Easy Bathrooms – a nationwide chain who had a decent choice of affordable products and, importantly, provided us with great customer service and prompt responses!
Because all the bathrooms are quite small with limited light, we chose white suites and clear glass bath/shower panels to make the rooms look bigger. We haven’t ordered the tiles yet as the company advised us to wait until the rooms are actually built so we can measure the space – that way we don’t over/under order and have to go through the effort of returning extras, or delay work waiting for a second delivery. We’re also keen to find mosaic strips suitable for the floor as a feature to makes the rooms look bigger, so we need to find somewhere that stocks them. At some point we’ll need to design and order three more bathrooms for the other barns, but we decided to leave that until we can afford to do the conversions, which won’t be for a while yet.
We also went over to our architect’s office to gather samples of the different building materials, which are required to discharge our various planning conditions before we start build. As homework, she gave us a heritage-style gutter sample, and some render samples to test against the buildings and choose our preferred colour. It’s definitely feeling like things are moving forward, even though we still have one planning application and a few other plans like electrics and drainage outstanding.
One of the next stages will be to finish our M&E (Mechanical and Electrical) drawings, and so we spent some time during the week looking through our Pinterest board and matching lighting ideas against the different rooms. While it’s quite easy to visualise what the buildings will look like inside, it’s much harder to consider how much natural light there’ll be, and what lights will be most suitable for the space, but we need to work out lighting circuits fairly early on, even if the fixtures themselves can be decided later. We struggled to find bedroom lights we liked, but hopefully have given our architect enough of an idea for her to come up with something that’ll work and look fabulous! We’re trying to find a blend between modern and traditional farmhouse styles, so the buildings feel natural and inviting but not old-fashioned.
This weekend we had a break as we visited friends living just outside Dartmoor, about a 50 minute drive from here. It’s so nice to have different scenery within an hour’s drive as it means lots of variation for our guests – we have a choice of moors with both Dartmoor and Exmoor; and various sandy or stony beaches along the Jurassic coast. Plus of course the forests, hills and farmland of the Blackdown Hills; and the Quantock Hills (which we’ve not actually been to yet). A couple of days away has meant we’ve not been able to catch up on our job list, but we’ve promised ourselves that in a year or so, once we’ve got everything in order and we have more time, we’ll really start to explore our local area in earnest.
Ley Farm Cottages 