A weekend of moving stones (again)

We recently discovered that the yellow-coated wire stays holding the telegraph pole in our garden in place are directly in front of where the window in our new house will be. Rather than have a view of the valley with this cutting in front, we’ve been exploring with BT Openreach whether the pole can be moved at all. After a couple of site visits, they’ve proposed changing the pole for a thicker one that goes much deeper and therefore doesn’t need stabilising. It certainly feels like the best solution as we don’t need to lose any hedge by relocating the pole, and the stays can be removed. 

The only challenge is that they need vehicle access to the pole through our land (this avoids closing the lane and creating havoc for everyone). And until this weekend, the huge pile of stones that we’d inherited and gradually been adding to last year was blocking the route. So we spent most of the weekend cleaning the stones and moving them a few metres out of the way, as Openreach could be here any time in the next few weeks. Safe to say, it wasn’t the most interesting of jobs! We stacked them in a much neater block in their new location so they looked more usable and were tidier – which lasted literally until five minutes before we finished, when one end of the block collapsed everywhere. So now we have most of a block of stones, and a pile right next to it – such a frustrating way to finish the weekend. 

There’s still two-thirds of the pile of stones left but hopefully there’s enough room for the vehicle to get through. It’ll be much easier to move the pole before the build starts in earnest and the ground is dug up for foundations and our sewage treatment plant, so we hope they come soon! 

At some point we also need to move the chest freezer out of the main barn, where it’s been living for the last year. Eventually it’ll go into our ancillary barn but as that’s not yet built, it’ll temporarily live round the back of the farmhouse under our terrace – right where we’ve been storing the old beams we cleaned up to use for light fittings. So one of the other priority jobs this weekend was to treat the beams (just in case the woodworm holes were current) and move them out of the way to be stored. I think we used up 4 litres of wood treatment in the end – not a quick job, but worth it if we can reuse them. 

We still need to pick our window frame colour, and this week our paint samples arrived from the window company. Having no idea what they’d actually look like in situ, we started Sunday with a walk to a couple of houses near us where we’d seen nice coloured window frames previously, to compare the samples against them. It was also the first time we’d been out walking in the hills together since Christmas Day, so it was nice to have a break and not work! None of the samples were quite right, but it’s helped give us clarity over the colour we do want – one that works against both stone of the main barn and the cream render we’ve chosen for the shippon wall, and that gives the place a nice cosy holiday vibe. With a 10-12 week lead time, ordering the windows is on the build’s critical path! 

Finally – we had another break on Sunday when we took part in the RSPB Birdwatch. In London we only really saw birds when we went to the local royal park (which was full of parakeets), so it’s been a complete change to see all the different species here – it’s all still quite novel! It’s especially nice to see the number of birds increasing year after year as they breed – although they didn’t all come out in our Birdwatch hour, we’ve had visibly-increasing numbers of blue tits, collared doves, blackbirds, and goldfinches. They must like all the food we put out!