The week Storm Ciarán derailed things 

This week started so well. National Grid arrived on Monday – having been booked for at least 4 months – and got on installing new poles alongside the existing ones. Because we’re installing 3 new supplies and significantly increasing the amount of electricity on the grid, they’re upgrading the transformer over the road in one of our neighbour’s field. Our electricity supply – and that of our neighbours – is mostly taken overhead at the moment which means we have a second electricity pole in the orchard (with a cable stay that disappears into one of our vegetable beds), and various cables that cut the view and go to a third pole on our neighbour’s driveway. Adding extra connections would have made the situation even worse and required new poles and cables, so we decided almost 2 years ago (when we started talking to Western Power before they were bought by National Grid) to bury the cables from the point the supply comes onto our land, up to where it comes out for our neighbour’s supply. This required our builders to lay one cable from the ‘entry pole’ up to our farmhouse to replace the overhead line, and find and connect to the already-underground cable that runs through our orchard to the farm behind (hence why the orchard is now a complete mess). 

Another branch then goes from the ‘entry pole’ between our barn and garage building into our courtyard where it branches off to each of the new buildings. It then goes under the wall between us and one of our neighbours, through their flower bed and under their driveway to another (replaced) pole. This is where the supply re-emerges above ground and connects to our other neighbour’s house. We are so lucky to have friendly and tolerant neighbours who have accepted this latest disruption and chaos!! 

Anyway – everything was going according to plan until late Tuesday, when National Grid called to say that due to Storm Ciarán they were cancelling all planned work on Thursday in favour of repairing fallen power lines (understandably). By this point we’d had new poles installed (but not old ones removed) and meter boxes on the building walls, the water that had collected in the trenches had been pumped out and cables laid, and some of the trenches filled in temporarily. We have metal plates in position across some of the trenches to allow access to our courtyard and to our neighbour’s house and farm – which is brilliant but definitely only a short-term solution. I was told that because it was a ‘customer paid job’ it would take longer to rebook and they’d be back in touch, so we need to keep on top of this as we’ve got several things now lined up assuming we got power this week. 

The second problem caused by Storm Ciarán is a bit more dramatic and was in the shippon – in our new house. As we’re still digging out and installing drainage on site, and we have so many building materials on site, the usual water courses through and around the courtyard can’t manage as much rainwater as normal. A flash flood overnight on Thursday resulted in water flowing past the front of the shippon and overwhelming the drain in the corner of the courtyard. The one-bed property at the higher end of the shippon was ok, but as the water rose in the corner, it flowed straight through our new temporary front door, down through our corridor and into the main living area. The new doors installed that will lead out into our garden stopped the water leaving the building and so it collected there like a paddling pool. We didn’t see any of this as I’d already left for London for work via a very convoluted route due to train cancellations – but the tide marks are still on the plasterboard about a foot high. I can’t even imagine how our poor builders felt when they arrived that morning. They’re drying out the room before assessing any damage, but seem fairly calm about it so this makes us feel pretty confident that they have it all in hand. It’s lucky it wasn’t 2 weeks later when the plastering should be done and the flooring and kitchen should have been started! 

We luckily survived without much more damage – the wind blew over some of our vegetables that we’ve now tied back up and will hopefully survive, and some garden arches. We picked over a bucket of medlar fruit off the floor that had blown off in the winds – fortunately our aga has been fixed this weekend so we can make a dent in the fruit we already have waiting, before we blet the medlars. We’re trying to stagger when the fruit is ready so we can fit everything in without too much stress – the aga being broken for over a fortnight has really set us back and meant we threw a lot of fruit away annoyingly.  

The garage building has really come on over the last couple of weeks. Our builders have built up the breeze block walls to the roof now (including temporary props to support them – thank goodness they survived the storm) – and the building is looking amazing. The downstairs rooms keep filling with water so hopefully it’ll be watertight soon – we’re also slightly nervous as the first floor floorboards were only supposed to be waterproof for 2 months and they were installed back in July… this summer really hasn’t been kind to us in terms of rain. 

We’ve spent some of the week and most of the weekend painting the top floor of the farmhouse, and finally we’re seeing real progress (when you have to do at least 3 coats including priming, it can take a while to ‘finish’ a section). We’ve finished the ceiling and walls in the shower room and have done most of the yellow bedroom too – we just have one part of a wall to paint white which we left at first as we couldn’t decide whether to paint it white or yellow, and wanted to see how it looked with the rest of the room first. We’ve also started painting the doors and priming the architraves – the builders had previously fitted the doors but then removed them so we could paint. It’s taking what feels like forever to get the doors done as we don’t have enough space to lie two down at once – instead we’re doing balancing one on a chest of drawers in our bedroom and doing one coat a day (the paint takes 16hrs to dry!). We’ve nearly got the first door done though – and it’s much easier than painting when in situ, as the paint drips and you’re constantly sanding bits down and redoing it. John also sanded the bedroom windowsill back to wood so we can repaint it – we had a real problem when we repainted the rest of the farmhouse doors and windowsills where it looks like previous coats of paint weren’t allowed to dry properly before another coat was applied, and so our paint kept blistering.  

We definitely felt pretty chuffed with progress this afternoon, until we wrote a list of all the ‘small’ remaining jobs to do in those two rooms and realised we still had so much to do. This is before we tackle the landing and the blue bedroom as well. We’re hoping to finish the shower room during the week as this is mainly finishing off paint edges and doing the woodwork, although I’m in the office again this week which means losing 2 evenings of painting. 

We also saved a bit of time to catch up on other jobs. This was the last weekend to check our kitchen boxes and flag any quality issues, so we unpacked each one, checked the item and repacked it. With 40+ boxes or packets, it took us about 3 hours! It was very exciting though to see it all in real life and not just on a computer screen. We also took the time lapse camera down to take the files off, which we haven’t done for a few months now (we aim to do it each month). We had a very quick look at the footage which is taken at 3-hr intervals four times a day – even when it’s sped up it’s exciting to see the changes! Although slightly disconcerting when something knocks the camera and you can just see the angle change… We can’t wait to look back on the whole build – we’ll need to think about moving it when we’ve finished all the outside work…