A day out at the Somerset Homebuilding and Renovation Show

The dark evenings really restrict what we can get done outside of work, so we usually try and spend our weekends working in the garden – especially at the moment as we need to clear the rest of the site before the build starts. But this weekend we actually spent Saturday out for the day at the Homebuilding and Renovating Show, at the Bath and West Showground. It’s run by the same people as the event we went to earlier in the year in Birmingham – they run a main event at the NEC and then have smaller ones around the country. While we spent the last event looking round all the stalls, this time we spent most of the day going between the two lecture theatres listening to various speakers – mainly on energy-related topics as the current costs mean energy efficient heating solutions are becoming far more popular.

Since we got our renewable quotes through, we’ve been toying with the idea of putting a third air source heat pump on our one-bed cottage. We’d originally planned to keep it all-electric with underfloor heating and ‘point-of-use’ electric hot water, but since we discovered our smart meter display at the back of a drawer and we turned it back on to test different costs throughout the farmhouse (including the electric underfloor heating in the conservatory), we’ve realised just how expensive all-electric will be to run. A couple of the air source heat pump quotes have been a bit more reasonable than we expected, and so we’re back to the drawing board to cost up the install plus running costs to see which is better.

One of the talks was about kitchen design – timely as this is one of the next things on the list (albeit it’s been there for a while!). As all of our new barns will be open plan, the kitchens will be a key part of the living spaces; they’re also going to be quite tight on space so need to be designed carefully. We came away from that talk with a plan to write a ‘design brief’ – a one page summary of how the kitchens will be used and the ‘space priorities’ for the different uses (cooking, eating, laundry etc); then style choices and any special requirements. Hopefully that will help to narrow down some of the options and help us get that moving forward.

We also took the opportunity to visit the stand of another holiday cottage company to get an idea of their proposition and letting fees. We haven’t yet decided whether to rent the cottage out ourselves or go via an agent – they take so much commission that it’ll make a big dent in our revenue; equally they’re likely to get more bookings than we could on our own and increase our earnings. We’ve booked an appointment for them to visit in the next couple of weeks and see what they think of our plans – the last time we had a holiday company over they gave us some good advice about how to increase lettings, so we’re hoping for a few more tips this time too!