A wet week

This week didn’t start as well as it could have done. We woke on Monday to find our main new drain cover had blocked overnight, and the torrential rains had overflowed and run both out of the gate (breaking up what remained of our driveway after having countless lorries driving over it), and down across the courtyard around the shippon. There were deep pools of water by the side of the shippon and in front of the French windows of the one-bed – luckily only a small amount leaked through the door. What’s more concerning is the water that leaked into the kitchen area in our new house again – we think it came up through the drains, which means once the kitchen is in it shouldn’t happen again, but our builders are still investigating. Thankfully the small floor area impacted has already dried out so shouldn’t cause any delays, although we’re a little nervous about going any further with installing the kitchen and flooring until we know for certain.

We have our next site meeting this coming week, when we’ll be finalising our site levels and drainage plan – our intention is come up with a solution that directs any excess rainwater out of the gate in a controlled way, and along the middle of the courtyard down into the main drain which is located at the lowest part of the site. It’s frustrating because the ideal solution would be to permanently change the levels in the yard to add a step and a small stone wall in front of the shippon to keep the water away, but the council have deemed that it’s “not in keeping with a farmyard” to build steps or walls in, so we need to be a bit more creative. The builders dug out in front of the shippon to install the insulated pipe for the air source heat pump, which has helped to temporarily reduce the yard level below the French windows at least.

As the bad weather continued for the week, our builders mostly focused on a few of the indoor jobs instead. They extended the base of the woodburner in our house, using more of the dogtooth flint stones we’ve found across the site and that we think had previously been used as an old floor. They also started levelling the right-hand side first floor in the barn, previously the hayloft, which will become the master bedroom and shower room.

In the weather gaps, our stone masons managed to finish the final wall of the communal barn, which is looking amazing. All that’s needed now is to add the coping stones, and then the roof can be felted and battened, in advance of the tiles going on. We’re planning to put solar tiles across both sides of the roof given that this building will house two laundries and have EV charge points, however it sounds like we could have a potential issue with National Grid, who, despite upgrading the transformer on the main electricity line just before our property, might restrict how much solar we can install because of the line’s capacity. We also found out that it’ll take another few months before we can connect the second half of the farmhouse roof (we could only connect one side of the roof before the transformer upgrade) because while we were waiting for this, a regulation was passed that no existing inverter actually meets. So now we’re waiting for a new inverter to be designed and approved. It’s yet another frustration in our quest to become as renewable as possible – starting 18 months ago when the council questioned why we wanted to use solar tiles and air source heat pumps. There’s so much focus on climate change and reducing the planet’s reliance on fossil fuels, but the basic infrastructure just isn’t ready yet – and the likelihood of a rural area getting the level of investment required is incredibly low.

We made a start on the rest of the painting in the shippon on my day off – priming most of the kitchen area and edging the ceilings. It’s an interesting challenge reaching the vaulted ceilings – balancing a step on our site manager’s platform to avoid getting paint on the beams. We didn’t make anywhere near as much progress as we wanted to, especially as we don’t want to hold anything up if the painting isn’t ready in time, and we’ve got a lot to get through! We’ve still got more jobs to finish in the farmhouse – we’re trying to get as much done before Christmas as possible, so the other day-off job was to insulate the loft hatch in the yellow bedroom. It’s more of an access hatch to get to the solar equipment so there’s really not much roof space to put much insulation in, but as it’s right beneath an air vent it’s pretty draughty and so anything is better than nothing.

The other big job almost finished this week is the tiling in the bathroom and ensuite in our new house. We prioritised our time painting both rooms last weekend ready for the tiler to start this week. The bathroom is fully tiled except for the side of the bath, which will be done once the bath frame has been completed. And our ensuite is just waiting for some extra tiles to be delivered in a few days’ time. Typically the back wall is just over a tile wide, so we ended up a few short in order to get the grout line in the centre of the back wall. Still though, it’s very exciting to see these first two rooms progressing!