Making good progress with our build 

In some respects we can hardly believe it’s only been a week since our last blog – but equally Sunday night seems to have come round very quickly! 

The council have now confirmed they’ve got all of our ‘conditions’ submissions so we’re just waiting for them to make a decision. Because our site is curtilage listed, the council set certain conditions we had to meet as part of our planning approval – essentially they have the final say on the exterior products we use, such as window frames and doors, and the type of gutters we buy. It’s a bit frustrating as it adds another step to the process when we want to keep true to the original look and feel anyway – and we have to pay to discharge each condition too! But we don’t have any other option – so as long as they are happy with our choices and don’t take too long to decide… fingers crossed! 

It’s been a pretty wet and rainy week, so luckily our builder has had at least a few jobs to do indoors. The doorway between the two-storey barn and the shippon has been blocked up to separate the two buildings, and he’s also started building up the base of the walls in our future home. None of our rooms are huge, but it’s hard to work out just how big they will be because the channels and blockwork are much wider than the actual walls will be. Even John trying out our bedroom didn’t help that much! 

On Tuesday – despite the rain and after a bat check from our ecologist (there weren’t any) – our builder started taking down the end of the shippon, where our extension is going to be. We have one main site manager who’s now here all the time and does a lot of the work on his own, so it was good to see he had company for this part of the job. Throughout the week they’ve managed to take down the entire wall, creating another pile of stones for us to use within the build (this must be the third big pile now).

They also took off the first set of roof tiles, so John’s been cleaning them to get years of dirt and algae off – they look so much cleaner and brighter now! The only trouble is that he’s only done 36 tiles – and we have probably 1,000 in total. He’s definitely going to be busy for some time… 

We’ve also been involved in two of the site visits this week. The first was with our solar tiles supplier, our roofer, our electrician, and our builders to look at how the solar tiles need to be fitted. They come prefabricated in rows of 4 tiles backed onto a metal sheet, which, while it should make them quicker to fit, requires the roof beams to be completely even – not easy with a 200+ year old house. Let’s hope the council just approve us using these… 

This week saw our monthly on-site meeting with our architects and builders, where we go over latest progress and the upcoming programme of work and budget. There are still a number of decisions outstanding (including some proposed changes to the structural design and drainage plans) so it’s a good opportunity to understand exactly what our options are. 

Our weekend was as busy as ever, and flew by. We’re due to have two walls demolished next week, and wanted to take the remaining glass out of the windows first so it doesn’t get spread about the site in the process (which wouldn’t be good either for our builders or for the dog). It was particularly difficult in the shippon where the floor has been dug down and one of us had to stand on tiptoe to catch the glass as the other knocked it out from outside. It definitely helped to tape the windows up first to reduce the shards. 

We spent the rest of the weekend trying to catch up with garden jobs – pruning the remaining apple and pear trees (the latter which are already in blossom), potting up seedlings and planting more seeds. We acquired a plastic greenhouse to give us more space – which is lucky because it’s already completely full – and we haven’t even got through half of the seeds! This is the point in the year that the house gradually fills up with seed trays…