Sun’s out – super speed!

Our builders have certainly been making the most of the good weather. The walls in our derelict barn are going up quickly – you can see the garage door gaps and the space for the window, so it’s starting to feel like a proper building. Because the walls will be built of breeze block and faced with stone, the builders are putting all these metal hooks in as they’re building the breeze block wall to connect to the lime mortar between the stones and hold it together. We saw something similar with a house across the valley – good to see the same thing happening here!

They’ve also been replacing the steel roof supports in the shippon. The metal supports there previously were completely rusted through (one of the reasons we needed to knock the front wall down and rebuild it). And they’ve filled in the floor in the shippon ready for concreting. It’s quite fun looking round every evening to spot what’s changed.

In other news – the scaffolders were here most of the week, putting the scaffolding up around the farmhouse. As we’re replacing the roof (solar slate tiles instead of the existing asbestos ones), the roofer will need access to the entire roof space – so it’s an all-encompassing design. The scaffolding has given us lots of new views across the valley and down into the kitchen garden – hopefully as this is a once-in-a-lifetime task, we’ll have enough time to head up there and take lots of photos!

Things are progressing on our to-do list as well. John has finished cleaning all the roof tiles we currently have (just waiting to buy more off our neighbour), and we’ve been able to progress our new electricity connections a bit more with National Grid. We’ve been talking to them since December 2021 but have had so many outstanding questions about our electricity load across the site, we’ve only recently been able to make meaningful progress – which is a bit annoying given their timescales for connecting new domestic supplies are around 5 months – just about the end of our build! We definitely need electricity before we finish phase one and our builders move onto a new project… There’s a real art in lining everything up in time – we don’t want the supplies switched on too soon or we’ll pay unnecessary standing charges, but we need electricity to test that our air source heat pumps work properly and get them signed off. We also can’t install the air source heat pumps more than 3 months before they get signed off, otherwise we can’t apply for the government grant scheme.

We had our monthly site meeting this week too – which is a good opportunity to run through where things are and what’s left (including what decisions we need to make by when). We now have a long list of decisions to make – some of which we hadn’t expected to make yet but that influence the core building structure (such as where to hang heavy lights, and where the underfloor heating manifolds will go). Given how many outdoor jobs we have to get through, it’s hard to spend sunny daylight hours indoors looking through websites, but hopefully we don’t have too much to get through!

We managed to spend all of Saturday and a good chunk of Sunday in the garden, working our way slowly through the job list. Saturday mostly involved tidying – we’d left the grass in our wooded area to grow to help the wildlife, but as everything seems to be on a ‘go-faster’ setting now it’s warmer weather, the area had been taken over by cow parsley and the grass was almost a foot high! So we dug up the cow parsley encroaching into the middle of the wood, and John cut the grass right back. I started weeding the front lawn flower bed to remove the grass and make space to plant the flowers we’d grown – I managed just over a metre before I decided it was a thankless task and moved on to something else! Bit by bit…

We also put our runner bean frames up – we try to make the most of the space we have, so we copied last year’s design and made a tall tunnel that we can get underneath. It’s pretty stable and gives the beans space and air. We had a decent crop last year so keeping our fingers crossed this year – runner beans are great to freeze and keep us going throughout winter.

There’s no way we’re keeping up with what we need to do – but we’re doing the best we can, while still taking the chance for a little play (instead of just work). This weekend we managed to squeeze in time to see a friend perform in the Blackdown Acapella choir on Saturday night, and then John ran the Great West Run on Sunday morning and managed a personal best – 13.1 miles in 1h32m!! Crazy…