This week was the moment we’d been waiting for for so long – our builders finally started on site! We’re technically still in the final stages of site preparation, with the builders starting by clearing space for their cabin (doubling up as a site office and break room), and then breaking up the concrete floor in the shippon, but it’s exciting nonetheless. They’re making great progress too, especially considering there are only two of them, and it can’t be easy navigating the low beams in the shippon.
All the concrete and stones that are dug out are being stored in the derelict barn (the one we’re going to demolish and rebuild). Our builder is still investigating whether it’s cheaper to take away the old material and bring in new material that’s ready to use; or to hire a crusher and use what we can on site, while recycling the rest locally. We’re really keen to reuse whatever we can locally, because of the carbon impact of transporting materials all over the place, but it’ll be hard to justify it with our limited budget if the costs are significantly different. We need a lot of stone to face the new barn walls, so we’ve spent most of the weekend salvaging whatever stone we can – both from the pile dug out, and from the footprint of an old barn – to minimise costs and also to avoid bringing in new materials. It’s a pretty hard job moving stone for hours on end, especially when it’s covered in clay soil and needs to be cleaned. We’ve managed to double our stack of clean stones though, so it feels well worth the effort.
We had our “pre-contract meeting” with our architects and builder during the week too. We weren’t really sure what to expect, but it turns out it was to agree how we all wanted to work throughout the project, and make sure the final details were ironed out, ready to put into our build contract. We covered all sorts of avenues – and while we trust our builder completely, it’s good for all parties to have everything in writing.
As the days are getting longer, we’ve got more time to get jobs done outside. We broke up the mundane stone-moving with various other jobs around the garden, including planting another 200 snowdrops in our sad snowdrop bank, and tidying up a few more vegetable beds ready for planting seedlings in the spring. We’ve already started planting some seeds – it’s satisfying to see them germinating already, our propagator is really making a difference with only a few seeds not having come up. We also gave the conservatory a deep clean on Sunday morning – we’ve been overwintering peppers and chilli plants in there, and had a horrible infestation of greenfly that needed clearing up. Now it’s looking lovely and clean, and ready to play host to all our seedlings until we can plant them out in Spring.
Ley Farm Cottages 