From top (of the farmhouse) to bottom (of the shippon)

If you’ve seen our social media posts you’ll know the exciting milestone for this week. After taking the farmhouse roof off last week, our carpenters have worked exceptionally hard to repair and replace the rafters in time for our roofers to start installing our solar tiles. Progress wasn’t particularly helped by torrential rain on Tuesday, but they arrived early on Wednesday to catch up, and worked super-fast to felt and batten down the main roof. (The roof over the bathrooms will need to be replaced so they’ve covered it temporarily for now). It was slightly disconcerting going up on the top floor to see the sky through one of the walls and in the back of the cupboard, especially given we’ve entered a rainy period, so it’s good it’s all covered now. Work is due to start inside this coming week we think – the electrician came on Monday to disconnect all the lights and plug sockets, so the interiors can be stripped back.

Then on Thursday the excitement started. The solar tiles come in blocks of 4 and look like slate so they’re perfect for our listed buildings. Our supplier – GB Sol – came to give our roofers a lesson in installing them, and then they were away! We have half of the front roof installed now, with the rest to follow next week as long as the weather stays nice. We’re not quite sure when they’ll be connected up as this involves installing the inverters inside, hopefully it won’t be too long as we want to use all the electricity we’re generating!

It’s giving us a flavour of just how complicated it is to manage a build. We’re also getting a battery installed at some point, but the room it’s going in is full of things that are going in our garage – of course we can’t move it all until our garage is ready. We’ve watched enough building programmes to know project managing a build isn’t easy, but with four different buildings on the go, the smoothness with which things are happening around here is inspirational for any project manager! We are truly in awe of our building contractor and site manager.

In the shippon our builders poured the base layer concrete floor in so it’s ready for the underfloor heating. Typically it was the same day as the torrential rain, so the floor is a bit dimpled, but our builders are confident they can handle this. It took 4 cement lorries to fill it – it was quite a sight seeing them lined up in the lane outside! They’ve also installed the steel above our French windows in our extension, and they’ve started to build up the breeze blocks above it. It’s starting to look like a proper building.

On our garage building our stonemasons continue to build up the walls, including the internal wall separating the garage and laundry. Another week and they should have finished the ground floor completely. It’s not a quick job but it’s looking amazing – exactly the look we were hoping for. It’s very likely that it will end up pushing our timescales out, but it’s a small price to pay for such a wonderful building.

Our week has mostly been taken up working out the different VAT rules for our different buildings. The building we’ll move into will be 0% VAT rated, while the other buildings are 5% VAT. The work to our farmhouse though is counted at standard VAT, although the air source heat pumps and solar tiles (and all costs directly associated with installing them) are at 0% again. It’s created a lot of work for our builder and some of the sub-contractors we’re using as they’re having to itemise each part of the build, but it’s worth it to make sure we don’t pay too much.

John’s main job this week was to paint the fascia boards on the back of the barn. They weren’t painted previously so needed sanding and priming first, which was a pretty messy job. They’re behind the gutter so you’ll only be able to see part of them, but it’s our only chance to paint them so we decided to do it now, rather than miss our chance and regret it. It’s the first time we’ve used the green paint on the building (matching the windows) so it was reassuring to see how wll it turned out. Now this is done, it also mean the scaffolding can be moved to another part of the building. It sounds strange but it’s been nice to see the views from the top – it’s not often we get such a high vantage point across the valley.

After chasing several times, we finally also got a date from National Grid for installing our new electricity supplies to the shippon and the main barn – which is the end of October/beginning of November! We knew it would be a long lead time but that puts paid to us moving in in October unfortunately.

The rest of the weekend was spent catching up on some of our garden jobs – picking and freezing our soft fruit before the birds get it (we have a resident tame blackbird who lives in the kitchen garden and pecks at all the fruit and vegetables); and clearing the broad beans to make space for French beans and brussel sprouts. There’s still a lot to do but we’re gradually getting through everything – as long as you don’t look too closely at the weeds in the flower bed!