Beam reclamation and general garden tidying

Our building plans continue to progress slowly – we’re still waiting for the council to make their minds up about our fourth planning application (to replace the front wall of the shippon which has no foundations and is held up by a rusty and unstable metal frame). It’s so frustrating – we ended up putting three applications through different routes as each time someone at the council had a better idea about how to get it through quickly – despite this it’s still been 10 weeks for what you’d think was an obvious approval. It’s holding everything up as we can’t finalise the structural engineering drawings; our builder can’t finalise the programme of work or the costs; and the quantity surveyor can’t then validate the cost estimate. We’ve now missed three target start dates, so our architect is getting everything else ready and we’re debating whether to proceed at risk and assume the permission will come through. 

One thing we have done that’s started bringing it all to life is clean up two old beams we found in the shippon, with the intention of using them as light fittings. We have no idea how old they are, but they’ve got holes cut in the middle as if they’ve been used to slot other wood into – we thought possibly for a first floor? They’ve been the victim of woodworm at some point and were absolutely covered in cobwebs and years of grime, but after a good brush and pressure washing, they’ve come up pretty nicely in shades of brown and orange. Hopefully they’ll be perfect for hanging up. 

We spent most of the weekend (and a day off on Friday) tidying the garden – raking the orchard and back lawn, digging up the rest of the potatoes, taking down the morning glory that had taken over the gooseberry bushes, and clearing back the strawberry plants and the countless runners that had ventured out into the rest of the kitchen garden. The greenhouse is still looking a mess with plants past their best, but we need to move the compost bins to the top of the orchard (currently they’re right in the middle of our new back garden), and are desperately trying not to fill them until then. We planted our first bed of onions on Friday – and then had to replant them again on Saturday after something managed to get under the chicken wire and dig them up! Cue new [possibly excessive] protection of layers of netting instead – there’s plenty of other food around to be had! 

We had fully intended to keep clearing the vegetation off the front shippon wall on Saturday (one of the jobs to finish before building work starts) but didn’t feel like climbing a ladder in the rain, so instead we started shifting the three dumpy bags of woodchip (currently located where our shippon extension is going and therefore also on the critical path). The grass has always struggled to grow underneath the lilac tree in the back garden and so we decided to cover it with woodchip instead. It took countless wheelbarrow trips, but we managed to clear nearly 2 of the dumpy bags, which is a great step forward. Now we just need one more good weekend to move the rest…