Re-roofed!

We seem to have reached the stage where the jobs completed are very visible and are completed mostly within the week, so it feels like progress is getting quicker. In reality our builders are working as hard as they ever have – in fact in some cases harder given that the weather has again been pretty awful and they’ve still been outside getting on with things despite the uncomfortable conditions and the damage the rain does to their tools over time.

The first bit of progress is that we finally have most of the shippon properly roofed! With a break on Wednesday when winds reached their peak, our roofers have managed to put about 75% of the shippon roof back on. Since John cleaned all the tiles when they came off, the roof is brighter and more orange than it was before – with the added bonus of not having ivy and jasmine growing up and through it (some before photos below). More of the tiles are unusable than expected – which in hindsight is a little annoying we didn’t check this before John spent days cleaning them all – so now I’m busy trying to find creative uses for them so we don’t waste them (one day I’m sure John will despair of my hair-brained ideas!). It looks like we’ll be about 180 tiles short so our roofer is bringing more on Monday for John to clean. It’ll feel like a big milestone once the roof is in place – the scaffolding can come down and we’re one step closer to being watertight.

At the same time, the roof lights and more of the roof insulation went in. Again, it’s a small thing but when you’re standing in the building it now feels that bit more complete. We’ve not been able to have many windows and roof lights because of the curtilage listing (very frustrating) so we’re relying on lots of subtle internal lighting additions to make the building feel airy and fresh. We met with our electrician last week to talk through these, which was incredibly useful as some of our ideas were going to be difficult to install and between us we managed to come up with easier and as-effective alternatives.

Our garage/communal building is coming along very well, with the walls increasing week on week. It’s been a tough week to build walls with the weather, but our builders have continued to make great progress both with the breeze block layer (and corresponding insulation) and with the outside stones. We’ve run out of suitable stones again so will need to order some more – another unexpected expense but one well worth it when you see the quality of the stonemasons’ work.

The farmhouse is definitely bounding on. We’ve achieved two big milestones this week – the first is that our ‘power station’ is finally up and running, albeit only half of the solar roof is connected up because we need to wait for National Grid to upgrade the local transformer first (planned for end Oct/early Nov). It’s been fascinating to see how much power we’ve generated (spoiler alert not much seeing as though the weather has been terrible) and how much power we use throughout the day and on what. The battery helps to maximise our use of generated solar power although we’re still a long way from significantly reducing our electricity bills – however it’s exciting to see this 200 year old farmhouse officially online!

We had a site meeting with our National Grid technician this week to talk through the plans from an electricity supply perspective, and make sure we’re all (including our builders) clear on what’s going to happen and when. Given there are so many dependencies on the power supply side of things (including access, as we currently have scaffolding up along the same route that we need to dig trenches for the power supply) we want to make sure this is all timed perfectly to minimise any down-time. Getting power onto the site is also needed to get the air source heat pumps installed and working – in this first phase of building we’re only going to finish our house and the farmhouse, but we will install the heating in both of the other buildings now so we don’t need to do much (if any) external work while we have visitors here.

We’ve also had the plasterers in upstairs in the farmhouse – they started on the top floor and gradually worked their way down to the bathroom and ensuite. They managed to complete the entire job in a couple of days and have done a really good job too. There are a few gaps between the plaster and the new wooden beams that have been overlaid on the old beams and purlins to create character (the original beams that stood out and created the rooms’ character were lost deep within the new insulation so we chose to recreate them with new wooden beams attached on top). We’ve been advised to caulk the gaps so hopefully we can do this in a way that doesn’t make it too obvious these are new beams!

Time is getting on and with our next guests staying mid-October, we suddenly realised we don’t have much time to get a spare room ready – we’re currently using our spare room to store everything from the rest of the house and need a space to empty the contents into to reclaim the space. So instead of getting tester paint pots for the top floor rooms from B&Q this weekend we decided to take the plunge and just choose the colours, despite them having a fairly poor selection. We’re trying to keep the previous carpets and curtains to save money so this adds some limitations to the decor and makes it a bit easier – one room will be blue and one yellow. We’ve got a couple of days set aside to prime the plaster and then paint – although the plaster needs to dry first which is slower in this wet weather! We’ve also gone back to look at our lighting ideas so we don’t hold up the ‘second fix’ electrics – it will be so nice to get the top floor sorted!

Over the weekend we finally got round to a job that we’ve meant to do for a while. In the back garden of the farmhouse we inherited a low-level fir shrub which, along with some cover plants, had totally taken over a section of the garden and just looked out of place. We finally got round to digging up the whole area and cleaning it up, which included buying spring bulbs and two roses to make the area look brighter and more attractive. We’ve put grass seed down across a large part of the original flower bed – it had strayed too far into the garden and took up too much space. Although we didn’t finish the planting this week, it shouldn’t take us too much longer to do – it has become apparent though that this area had previously been used to dump rubbish like old metal, china and glass – so it’s taking longer to dig this all out first. Given how overgrown the area had got, hopefully this will look much nicer and cleaner.

We’ve continued to make chutneys, fruit jellies and jams to offer our guests – extra pressure added as this year so much of our fruit is ready at the same time rather than being staggered over a few months. We think the rain has been a major factor in this – our quinces are splitting with the amount of moisture and are rotting on the tree early, and the plums are so heavy the branches are breaking. Our mulberries and damsons have got damp and mouldy on the tree before we can pick them. It’s been hard to keep up with everything especially when fruit is ready earlier than expected. A lesson learnt for next year (subject to how well our preserves sell) is to make time to strip a tree when the fruit is ready and cook it down over a short space of, rather than trying to pick based on when we’re free, which seems to be very little at the moment…