No winding down for Christmas here… 

It’s hard to believe it’s the end of Sunday again – and with Christmas only just over a week away, we’re somewhat frantically trying to get the top floor of the farmhouse ready for family and friends to stay over the festive season. Our aim this weekend was to get the second [blue] bedroom finished and ready to use – it sounds a bit complicated but the bed we currently have only fits useably in this room, and we wanted to get it all painted before the second bed arrives on Monday and we lose the ‘storage’ space in the yellow bedroom and have to move the existing bed back from the yellow bedroom into the blue bedroom.

It turns out it’s a really frustrating room to paint – the plaster doesn’t join neatly at the edges and the room isn’t straight in any direction, so it’s impossible to get a clean line between the wall and the ceiling. Not the best room to use contrasting wall and ceiling colours, but hopefully no-one will look too closely… We managed to get the walls finished (save for the touching up) but only one coat on the woodwork, so hopefully we can get up early enough to get it all done before the second bed arrives. We already have sofas, fridge-freezers and boxes of lights spread around the house – we don’t need beds everywhere too!

One of the never-ending jobs in the farmhouse is painting the doors… the first year we moved in we painted most of the downstairs and first floor doors in situ, which was a nightmare as the paint kept dripping or peeling. So where we’ve had the opportunity to take off the top floor doors and paint them horizontally, we’ve taken it – even though it means we’ve had to navigate partially-painted doors in our bedroom for a while (it’s the only place we have space and something big enough to balance the door on). We’re now on our third and final door – with our builders hanging the other two this week to get them out of the way and tick another thing off. They’ve also planed down the bottom of the third door that’s now being painted, which was sticking on the carpet after it had been re-laid.

We’d forgotten to sort out the finishing touches in the shower room (toilet roll and towel holders, bolts etc) so have been searching around various websites to find the right accessories, and squeezed in a late Saturday night trip to B&Q (how times have changed). We’re still a way off getting the entire floor finished, but if we can just get the bedrooms and shower room usable with accessories and curtains, that would be amazing. Fitting everything is a job for this week, assuming it all arrives in time…

Our builders have made great progress on the rest of the build – seems there’s no winding down for Christmas here! They’ve started building the plant room on the side of the three-bed barn – this will house the hot water cylinder and the various equipment needed for the air source heat pump once finished. The council have insisted on approving the style of the plant room, so while it’s been built out of breeze blocks, it’ll be insulated and timber-clad to keep to a ‘farm feeling’. They’ve also started building the wall around our main drain to stop any overflow coming down into the courtyard, which will be faced with stone soon.

And they’ve been working inside the main barn, putting up the wall partitions on the top floor which will become a bedroom and separate shower room. It’s so exciting to see this building taking shape too, even though we’re only doing the basic ‘shell and core’ elements now, and will leave the interior to be finished at some point in future.

The glass windows and doors arrived for our garage/communal building this week, which is incredibly exciting! It feels a bit like a phoenix rising from the ashes with this barn – compared to the derelict building that was there when we moved in, it looks so different and improves the site so much. Unfortunately we don’t have a key for the door yet so can’t get inside the top floor anymore – but our builders are continuing to build out the space inside and insulate it thoroughly.

Aside from the build, John has been having more fun and games this week – this time with both the council and the water company. We’ve had water leaks since the spring – with one by our neighbour’s barns repaired and then another suspected one at the meter which was ‘fixed’ when the meter was replaced a few months ago. Part of the repair apparently meant burying the meter so it was impossible to find. Two weeks ago we finally had South West Water come out to locate the meter and John was told to do a ‘water leak check’ to make sure the leak had been fixed. A couple of muddy trips to the meter and siphoning out water, and it turns out that even with the stopcock off, we’re using 0.15 cubic metres of water per day, which adds up to rather a lot over time!

The council have been testing his patience too. Every planning application has to go through a validation process once submitted, to make sure all the documents are suitable. Our latest (sixth) planning application to change glass doors to wood and add a new air source heat pump and plant room was submitted late November, and John is still going back and forth to provide them with extra information the council has decided they need. The latest is that the location plan for the property – used for the last five applications – is not suitable anymore (no idea why), and trying to meet their new demands has led to a further week’s delay in validation. No wonder it takes so long and costs so much to get applications through!