Last week we talked about the progress our builders have made on the top floor of the farmhouse, insulating the space and building up the stud walls along the sides of the building underneath the eaves. This week they’ve added more stud walling – this time around the new shower room and the new bedroom wall (we’ve had to move the wall and door to one of the bedrooms so that the shower room is accessible from the landing and can be used by both bedrooms). It’s incredible just how quickly a space can be made into different rooms! Our builders have also started putting the plumbing in from the top floor down to join the pipes from the existing bathroom.
We’ve been looking into our options to solve the problem of the top floor ‘bouncy’ floor. Solving it structurally (i.e. putting steel beams in) will be really disruptive and time consuming – we’d need to get listed building consent and planning permission from the council because the steel beams would go through the house and fix outside on the stone walls. Given our experience with planning permissions to date, it’s unlikely we’d get approval this side of Christmas, which would cause significant delays vs our current timeline (assuming we’d get approval at all).
The other option we’ve been given is to use a ’soft’ wall covering in the bathroom (i.e. some sort of plastic) instead of tiles, which would allow for an element of movement. If we used normal tiles then any movement from the floor would risk cracking the grouting and let water through behind the tiles and possibly leaking into the floor below. It’s hard to visualise what the whole room would look like so we stopped into B&Q to take a look, but annoyingly they only had very small sample tiles, so it didn’t really give us what we were looking for. It’s frustrating as we’d like to get a feel for it before we commit – we’ll have to keep looking.
Better weather also means our builders have been able to get on with some of the outside work. They’ve finished the roof beams in the shippon – now the new beams are in place they’ve also been able to build up the breeze block wall to the top. The apertures have been created in amongst the beams for the roof lights, which hopefully means it’s nearly time to put the roof tiles on. The tiles have been stacked in the courtyard for months now, so it’ll be a relief to get them back on the roof and away from the risk of damage. At one end of the building, our builders have connected the extension roof to the existing shippon roof and built up the stone wall around the space where our french windows will be. At the other end they’ve ‘finished’ the edge of the roof by building it out over the eaves, and tidied the corner of the stone wall.
In between all of this, our builders have made a bit more progress in the main barn – shaping the kitchen window from the inside – and have been moving concrete blocks up onto the garage building, getting ready to build up the first floor.
The aim for next week is to start work on replacing the rotten roof over the bathrooms in the farmhouse – which means emptying both rooms and taking towel rails and decorations down to protect them from damage. We’re rapidly running out of space in the house, so have spent the week sorting and boxing up the equipment we took home after the terrier races last week, so it can all go back in storage and make a bit of room. It’s felt like chaos for the last few months so we can’t wait to get the bathrooms done and have at least one less thing to worry about.
This week we also finally heard back from the council about two of the materials we’d submitted for approval two months ago – the roof vents for the shippon and the wood burner flues we’re using. We still have a few more materials to get approval for (one of which has been submitted and the rest we’re yet to submit). We’re getting there – albeit slowly!
Ley Farm Cottages 