Tiles, tiles, tiles (and some demolition)

More demolition! Our builders had to prepare our derelict barn for digging foundations (planned for next week). It’s been used for storing rubble throughout the build – the final pile was taken away on Thursday so the concrete floor could be broken up. We’re keeping parts of the old walls in place as the building is cut into the hill, and the walls are holding back the soil for the front garden and orchard – it seems pointless to remove them and then put a new wall in its place. We did however need to take down the top part of the wall so it was more aligned to the height of the front garden, and keep the lower part in place, which our builders carefully did by drilling holes along the wall and then essentially snapping the top part off. They’ve done a very smart job too!  

Progress continues on our shippon too. Making the most of good weather, the cement mixer arrived at 7:30am on Wednesday to pour the foundations along the front wall and extension – they’re stepped to accommodate the hill slope so the mixer had to keep moving down the wall to fill up each section. And we have a new drain in place too, replacing the old hole in the ground that kept getting blocked each time it rained. The foundations keep filling up with water (a combination of natural groundwater and rain) so we currently have a pump going to try and keep it as dry as possible, ready for the blockwork to start next week. We’re told it’s fast progress from that point onwards – we thought it’s been going pretty fast already so we’re excited to see what’s coming! 

Our monthly site meeting took place this week, so it was good to catch up with our architects and builders together and run through the outstanding issues and proposed mitigation. Because we need to get the council’s approval for any external materials we use (thanks to the buildings being curtilage-listed), we need to allow an additional lead time before the materials are required. It’s taken four weeks to get the nod on our window design which is longer than we expected, so our to-do list has suddenly filled up with making final choices in case it takes them this long again. 

We had two main focuses for this week. The first was deep cleaning our aga – it’s too hot to do a proper job normally so we time it with our annual service when we turn the aga off. It always looks so much better when it’s sparkling – and this time John spent time scraping all the layers of splattered fat off the top too, so it looks better than before. 

The other focus was cleaning the shippon roof tiles. It’s our once-only chance to clean the years of grime off them while they’re off the roof, and it’s a big job – we estimated that we have c.1,800 tiles of our own, not including the ones we’re buying off a neighbour that have sat in a field for who knows how long. We think we have about a month before the tiles are going back on the roof – we can’t delay this without incurring cost, and now we’ve started we can’t leave some tiles not cleaned – so most of our weekend daylight hours are spent brushing off the easy bits, and then hosing the rest of the dirt and algae off. It’s not the most glamorous job but the tiles look so different afterwards, it’ll be worth the effort when it’s finished.