A month in

It feels like it’s been particularly busy this week. The building work seems to be progressing well despite the weather – our builders had ordered a crushing machine for a day this week to break down the concrete rubble and make it more usable. Typically, it turned out to be the coldest and most miserable day, with snow and rain almost the entire time – not a fun day to be outside crushing concrete! We’re amazed by how our builder carried on regardless and managed to get rid of at least two-thirds of the material – very impressive. He also started demolishing the old derelict barn at the same time – slowly but surely it’s coming down! 

Inside, the builders have started building the party wall in the shippon between our new home and the one-bed cottage at the end. You can see the footprint of the one-bed cottage now – it feels a bit small but hopefully looks are deceptive, and we can turn it into a nice, cosy property. They’ve also cut away part of the concrete floor in the bigger barn, ready to lay the foundations for the wall that’ll support the new floor we’re putting in. It’s already filling up with groundwater a bit, but we don’t know yet whether that means more tanking or not. 

On Friday our architect submitted details of our proposed materials to the council as part of our planning conditions. It feels like we’ve spent months looking at different options for things like windows, doors, and guttering – now we’ve reached the point that we need to start ordering them, we need to get the council’s approval first. The joys of doing work on listed buildings – it all has to be in keeping with the surroundings. We’re keeping everything tightly crossed that the council don’t reject any of our plans – it wouldn’t be unheard of though! 

National Grid visited on Tuesday. We started talking to them over a year ago to work out what electricity supply we’d need across the site, but it’s only recently we’ve been able to confirm details such as the air source heat pump models. Without this, it would be impossible to estimate how much electricity we’d be using, and what level of upgrade they’d need to do to the network. There are still a few final details left (such as the locations of the meters for the new buildings) but we’re close to getting this finalised and ticked off the list. 

The other success we had this week was with Openreach, who came on Friday to remove the yellow-coated stays (steadying cables) from the telegraph pole outside our new lounge window and french doors. There was a bit of doubt at first about whether the stays could just be removed, but after much discussion and deliberation, the stays were off! And just in time too, as next week work is starting at the end of the shippon, and access to the pole would have been difficult – if Openreach hadn’t been able to reach the pole from our side, they’d have had to close the road to do the work – and charge us extra for it!  

The bad weather continued over the weekend so we‘ve been a bit limited in what jobs we managed to do outside. As always we seem to be a couple of months behind – buds are starting to appear on some of the orchard trees and we still haven’t pruned them yet. We pruned 2 this weekend before the rain hit on Sunday, but that still leaves 11 left to do before they start growing in earnest. We also cut back the shrubs in the front – one of the targets for next week is to get scaffolding up around the shippon and barn, which meant clearing the shrubs away from the wall. It looks slightly strange from an angle, with a step cut in – as long as it makes it easy to get the scaffolding up and to move around on it safely. The bushes will always grow back!