Of farmhouse roofs and rafters

This week our builders started on the farmhouse. The work planned is far simpler than the other buildings – replace the asbestos tiles with solar slates, open up the ceilings in the top floor so they’re pitched and a much better head height, and add a shower room so we don’t have three rooms sharing one bathroom (and so occupants of the top floor don’t need to go 1.5 flights to use the loo in the night).

Day one started well – the roofers arrived and stripped the roof completely. They had to wear proper suits and breathing masks because of the asbestos – it was quite disconcerting working at the dining table and seeing white and orange-suited people going up and down the scaffolding ladder all day! The tiles were hauled down in bundles – most of which made it down in one piece – a couple weren’t balanced properly and tipped their contents over the tomato plants which we promptly moved!

After that things started to go downhill though. The rafters are very old and many are in poor condition and need to be reinforced with new wood. In particular, the roof over the bathrooms is almost completely rotten and will need to be replaced either now or with the next couple of years. Because the inside plasterboard is attached to the rafters, it’s going to be a big job as it means ripping the ceilings out and replastering – we’ve decided to do the work now before we start renting out the farmhouse so we don’t need to take time out of the calendar in future and lose bookings. It’s particularly demoralising as not only is this additional cost at a time where we’re already incredibly tight, but we’d finished decorating both bathrooms to the point they’d only need a light touch-up when we moved out.

We now have two stonemasons working on our garage building, and they’re making real progress, having completed the back and most of a side wall up to first floor height. The internal wall is going in too – once they’ve finished the ground floor walls, the building should be strong enough to put the first floor joists in, and then build the first floor walls. It’s incredible to see their workmanship – every stone perfectly shaped and slotted in.

In our new house in the shippon, all the wood shuttering is ready for concreting – which is due this week. The steel lintel has also gone into our window frame – it’s getting easier to visualise what the room will look like now all the walls are in place. And despite working hard on the farmhouse roof, our joiner has found time to finish the left-hand upstairs room in the main barn – the roof tie that cut across the room has now been removed, and the room is taking shape.

It’s been a busy week for us as well. John’s finally managed to finish cleaning all the shippon roof tiles now (we estimate there are approx. 2,500) including the ones we bought from our neighbour, which hopefully should cover the extension.

Most of the weekend we spent out in the garden catching up on cutting back and planting out – much needed as the last few weekends have been busy and we’ve only managed to snatch a few hours in the evenings. Our pumpkin/squash arch is taking shape – there are 12 different varieties on the arch in total and most seem to be trailing nicely (and fast!). We picked most of our peas and mangetout to freeze – our experimental new location seemed to work ok (under the pine trees) but our makeshift bamboo pea frames let us down and kept collapsing, which damaged the plants. It’s firmed up our next project though – a new raised bed and properly-made frames that we can put up each year. That’ll give us something to do over winter! We tried something we’d seen on facebook this year with our strawberries – little organza bags that stop the birds and slugs eating them as they ripen. Safe to say it was mostly a failure – the birds simply pecked through the bags – or tore them off and strew them across the garden… ah well, at least we tried.

And the rest of the time we’ve been busy batch cooking! Our aga costs a fortune to run (we estimate about £7 per day in the summer) plus it makes the house fairly unbearable in the hot weather as it continually heats the kitchen. So we’ve decided to turn it off over summer to save money, which means no cooking facilities other than a microwave. Everything has been cooked and portioned to reheat using that, we’ll see how long we can keep it off for!