A week of significant progress

This feels like a particularly long week – so much so that we had to question whether some of our notes were from this week or the one before… We ended last weekend with torrential rain, and started Monday morning with a second (albeit lighter) flood in our new home as the partially-dug drains were overcome again and backed up into our lounge. With more rain due throughout the week, our builders acted quickly and put pumps in to get the water moving out through the drains, while prioritising digging the culvert drainage channels that direct the water around the side of the shippon rather than into the courtyard and underneath it.  

On Tuesday we had our monthly site meeting with our builders and architect. It’s always a good time to catch up on progress across the buildings and update our to-do list for the coming weeks, which is getting increasingly-longer as we need to start deciding the various finishes (this month included light fittings and paint choices amongst other things). Unsurprisingly our phase 1 completion date has moved further back – from a second provisional date of 22^nd December we’re now well into the new year. Two of the outstanding questions relate to the air source heat pump (ASHP) and the entrance/private space for the one-bed property – both of which will require planning permission and a new application. John has been in contact with the council for almost two months about approving our plans for screening the two ASHPs we have permission for (we still can’t quite believe we need planning approval for planters and trellises and we still don’t have this approval) – so the anticipated timescales for an entirely new (sixth) application would be seriously detrimental to our project if we paused.  

In the shippon, the walls in our new living area were plastered ahead of our wood burner being installed on Thursday. A couple of weeks ago our builder created a hearth for the wood burner from some dog-tooth stones we’d found whilst digging elsewhere on the site, as we were keen to reuse some of the old features we’d found. A heater/dehumidifier has been running almost nonstop trying to dry out the building so that the flooring can go down. The plasterer is due to return on Tuesday to complete the rest of the rooms – cue a trip to B&Q on Saturday morning to spend a small fortune on paint samples at B&Q so we’re ready to prime and paint as soon as the plaster is dry. 

Our builders have spent most of the week on our garage building – finally being at the stage of building the first floor roof and bat loft, and covering the beams with tarpaulin to help the floor dry out. The flooring was supposed to be waterproof for two months – which was up at the end of October – so once it’s dried they’ll see whether it’s survived or whether remedial action needs to be taken. The final parts of the walls seem to have appeared quite quickly, so now having a roof as well feels like things are suddenly accelerating, which is exciting and slightly nerve-wracking all at once! 

We finished the week with Thursday and Friday off work. We’d intended on spending four days replacing our front gravel path with bricks, but a very wet Thursday meant we spent the first day painting the top floor of the farmhouse instead (more coats of paint but nothing finished yet). We did manage to get outside on Friday though, and made a good start on the path. The whole house is surrounded by gravel paths – it’s horrible when the gravel gets stuck to your shoes and walked into the house, and you step on a little bit on a tiled floor in bare feet. We planned to replace the gravel gradually but had to wait until after parts of the building work – for the scaffolding to be removed and the electricity supply buried along the front path. Despite the gravel already being removed from the first part of the path, it still took us a while to dig out enough of the path and replace with layers of hardcore and sand, compacting each layer as we went. We used the leftover shippon red clay roof tiles to line the path, kindly cut in half by our builders, and aiming to create a connection between the farmhouse and the shippon. We managed to get from the orchard entrance almost as far back as the electricity meter. It’s been quite hard to navigate the curves in the path and change in height as the path goes uphill in two dimensions – this resulted in having to re-lay several parts as the gradient wasn’t quite steep enough. There’s still over half the distance of the first path to go – and a new flower bed to create along the way – but it already looks great and it’s so much nicer not to be walking over gravel. Hopefully with a few odd days off throughout the rest of the month, the front path might be finished by the end of November…