Our lovely new bathroom roof!

More progress in the farmhouse this week – the most exciting part for us is our new bathroom/ensuite roof! The original tiles came off back in June along with the main farmhouse roof – the bathroom and ensuite are part of an extension added on top of the kitchen a while ago and so have a separate roof. At this point it was clear that the wood was too rotten to stay, and so we had to replace it. This included ripping out the inside ceilings and installing new roof felt, insulation and plasterboard, which the builders finished last week. It’s been a bit disconcerting hearing the birds and squirrels running along the felt, so we were very pleased when the roofers turned up this week and installed the new slate roof. It looks so smart – now we just need the inside of the rooms finished too and life can return (a little) to normal. 

John also took the opportunity with the scaffolding still up to paint the fascia boards above the new roof so they’re in keeping with the rest of the building. He’ll be glad when the final fascia board is done and dusted! 

On the top floor, our builders have spent the week installing wood on top of the purlins and rafters that were originally sticking out into the room and adding character. With the amount of insulation houses need now, we lost the 15cm wooden beams under the boards and plasterboard, so we decided to extend them to retain some of the old feel (although these are new lengths of sanded wood rather than the very old thick reused beams that were there before). It’ll hopefully look a bit better though than a plain plastered wall and ceiling would do in an old farmhouse. 

We also – excitingly – got a step closer to being able to generate our own electricity! We had the solar tiles installed back in the summer but for some reason it’s taken until now to get the rest of the kit installed so we could actually capture the generated power and then use it. We’ve turned what was our storage room at the back of the house into what we’re endearingly calling our ‘power station’ where we’ll have our solar inverters and batteries. We spent an evening emptying the room – which involved moving one freezer outside under the terrace and the fridge-freezer we brought from London into the only remaining spare space (the dining room). With a sofa and the tables from the front hall too alongside the normal dining room furniture, it’s starting to feel a little cosy in there… 

The install hasn’t been without challenges, and still isn’t finished. As well as being delayed from the original date, the electricians turned up and tried to drill into the stone wall but gave up after breaking too many drill bits. The next day they turned up with wooden sheets to create a false wall to screw everything into – it’ll look great but it’s a shame we didn’t get the chance to paint it first so we could get a neat finish around the various devices. Once it’s all finished, we’ll have two inverters connected to the solar panels, then two batteries and our Mixergy hot water cylinder connected to a device called an Eddi that will decide whether the solar power goes to our immediate usage, to the battery, to heat up the hot water or is exported back to the grid. Such a clever system – although now we’ll spend half our free time trying to work out how to change our electricity use so we keep our bills as low as possible. As if we didn’t have enough to do! 

In the shippon now that the underfloor heating and screed is down, our builders have built up the party wall between our new house and the one-bed cottage we’re building. They’ve also started putting the insulation in the roof – the plan was for the roofers to put the clay tiles back on this week but given the forecast is for strong winds, we’re fully expecting this to be delayed (which is better than them risking spending all day on a windy roof, even if it is just one storey high).  

We also had a rather frustrating visit from someone to quote us for a sewage digestion solution (we’re not on mains sewage here and our existing septic tank is both far too small and is up the hill from the new buildings). The civil engineering company we’ve been using had recommended a brand that was incredibly expensive and way too far outside our budget, so our builder has been amazing and been looking for alternatives, hence the visit this week. The way these solutions work is that all the effluent waste goes into this big underground ‘plant’ (for want of a better word) and is broken down until there’s only water left. This then needs to be discharged out somewhere – and despite it being water, it needs to go into a flowing water course or into a drainage field.  

What made it frustrating was that he took one look at the proposed location for the discharge to go in, and gave his view that it was not up to the Environment Agency’s standards because the water course is not wet enough. We’ve gone back to the civil engineering company to get their view again – but to be honest as they previously designed a gutter solution that required rainwater to flow up a slope (!) we’re not holding out much hope. We’ve started exploring other options, but these will either ask for a lot of goodwill from our neighbouring farmer or result in us chopping down half of our wooded area, which could then cause issues with the ecology requirements we need to meet. To have this all come up at this late stage is beyond annoying, and it’s taking everything we’ve got not to react and instead to focus on the outcome. 

After all this, we did manage to have what felt like a very normal Saturday! We spent the afternoon at a local village fair (mainly to check out the BBQ techniques to see how we can improve the terrier racing event next year), and then went up into the hills to Smeatharpe Stadium to watch stock car racing. It felt pretty strange not to be spending the day doing jobs – although we did say we’d need to include a trip to Smeatharpe in our visitors book – it was so much fun and would be a great evening out for anyone visiting who’s looking for something a bit different. 

We did of course get back onto the jobs on Sunday – a very wet day meant we spent most of it making jam and chutney to make a dent in the fruit we’ve grown (this year it all seems to be ready at the same time so we’re trying to get through it as quickly as we can before it goes off. We also chose both the skirting board styles for the top floor (harder than we expected as over the years it looks like people just used what was available and so every room has a different style – in fact one of the rooms has two different skirting boards!) and the shower wall panels for our farmhouse. Now we just need to work out how we install the panels into the alcove built into the shower cubicle for toiletries… one for tomorrow though I think!