Building up the walls

Another week of sunshine, and another good week of progress from our builders. The walls of our derelict barn (soon to be our garage / laundry / communal area) are coming along nicely – as they’re building up the breeze block inner walls, our builders are also adding the insulation and plastic cladding, and our stonemason has started on the outer stone wall. It’s getting easier to visualise what the building is going to look like – although it still feels like there’s a long way to go. We’re starting to worry about how many stones we’ll need though – we did hope our two large piles salvaged from the site would be sufficient and we’d get away without buying any, but already that’s looking doubtful. You can get specially-cut corner stones – ‘quoins’ – which we’re going to need to buy, and possibly a bag of normal wall stones too. The costs just keep adding up!

We had a visit from Building Control on Wednesday – although we’re not involved in these conversations (our architect and builder do these), it seems to have gone well as we weren’t informed of any implications or changes required.

We’d seen an extra car on site this week but hadn’t appreciated what who that was until we went into our two-storey barn to move a workbench we’d inherited and wanted to keep, and found the shell of our downstairs bedroom and bathroom already in place. Our carpenter has certainly been working quickly! The space is feeling quite small suddenly – we’re hoping that’s just because we’re used to the bigger space, and because there’s no natural light in the building. Once the big barn doors are changed for glass, it should make quite a difference – and once the room’s been plastered and painted a lighter colour. We’re still a long way away from that though.

John has now picked up the work required to get the council Conservation Officer’s approval for the various conditions she placed on our build when she approved our plans initially. It seems to be taking forever to get these discharged (elements of them were submitted back in March), and our architect’s time will be better spent finalising key parts of our build, rather than continually chasing the council. It’s so frustrating that it’s taking so long and we have no idea why – a lot of these conditions are for fundamental materials and waiting will slow down our build (and add more cost in if our builders can’t progress at the pace they anticipated). It seems completely irrational to us too – although there’s likely something underlying that we’re just not aware of, so we’ll take stock after John’s made contact with her. We really can’t have any delays!

We’ve spent most of the long weekend outside – either planting up seedlings to go into our kitchen garden (an effort to clear the greenhouse and conservatory which are now getting too hot for plants – as evidenced by our rocket seedlings that have bolted) – or weeding. We put all our efforts into weeding our daffodil strip this weekend – it’s such a shame that the weather was too cold for us to sit out and enjoy them this year, and many of the bulbs we planted just haven’t come up (we have fewer irises this year, and the crocosmia and alliums never appeared). The rest of the garden is looking such a mess of weeds and grass in the flower beds, so we’ll start to catch up in the coming weeks. We are trying to take some breaks too this year so we don’t miss the spring and summer – we managed a long walk on Sunday and then went to the local village fair on Monday, which was pretty good fun. The fair always finishes with an eggathon – essentially pairs standing opposite each other and throwing raw eggs between them until one drops it. The challenge is that after each round the distance gets bigger – cue lots of people ending the fair covered in egg!