A busy weekend

Everything is starting to ramp up suddenly. Since our meeting last week, we’ve exchanged several emails with our architects and builder to finalise details on the build – changing a few things to make a couple of bedrooms bigger, and confirming what’s in scope of our first phase of work and what’s to come later. On Monday we also received our first view of detailed costs, and so spent the evening running through each item to check what was included and what’s still to be confirmed (marked as ‘provisional sum’). It’s been helpful to clarify roughly how much the first phase will be, and what we’re letting ourselves in for! Excitingly we’ve also confirmed our solar tile order (slightly scary too as they’re not cheap!!). It feels like there’s still a lot to finalise, but we’re sure it’ll come together in time! 

The weekend has been pretty successful too. We had a couple more things to do to get the site ready for building – mainly clearing everything in the vicinity and then clearing the contents of the main barn, which we’ve been using for storage since we moved in. On Saturday we successfully moved our final compost bin (and contents) up to the new location at the top of the orchard. It looks so much better up there, and is going to be so much easier now it’s closer to where we generate the waste and use the compost. 

We’ve ended up leaving a lot of the normal garden jobs to prioritise clearing the site, so we’re now in a position to try and catch up on a few! Luckily Sunday turned out to be a bit warmer than expected, as we needed to clean the greenhouse before it starts filling up with seedlings. We hadn’t got round to cleaning it last year so it was well overdue – and looks much better now the algae and moss has been removed. We also found a pupa that had burrowed into the wood shelf to make its chrysalis… no idea what it was but I’m glad we found it before it hatched, as it could have done a lot more damage. I took the opportunity to tidy it up and reorganise everything – bring on planting season! 

We also managed to work through a few random garden jobs – we’ve used up most of the remaining vegetables batch-cooking soup, and so have started covering up the empty beds in the kitchen garden to warm the soil and hopefully get some early planting in. John has set up his new rain gauges and thermometers that he got for Christmas – although now he keeps pointing out how cold it is indoors (personally I think the temperature gauge is still settling down!). 

Our final outdoor job was to set up our time-lapse camera – given this is a once-in-a-lifetime project, we want to try and capture progress throughout. With everything else we have on, it’s so easy to forget to take photos and document the changes we’re making, so hopefully this camera will do it all for us! We tried a few different locations but there are so many bushes or trees in the way, we’ve ended up securing it onto the window sill of our spare bedroom. Just enough time to test it and check the angle and picture quality over the next few weeks! 

Now – off to make more soup….