With our builders on their Christmas break, it’s been feeling very quiet around here, especially when family and friends went home after staying for Christmas and New Year. We’ve taken the opportunity to make some progress decorating in our new house. We’re saving a bit of money by doing all the painting ourselves, but we’re also very conscious that our builders have a tight schedule to fit everything in when they come back, and we don’t want to hold things up by not having painted. Plus it’s much harder to paint around fittings once they’re in, so it makes our job easier if we can paint all the walls and ceilings now while they’re bare.
It’s been a little hard to know where to start, seeing as though we have almost an entire house to prime and paint. So we’ve started with areas we know will need fixtures – the ‘plant cupboard’ that will have all the heating and hot water equipment in, and hopefully double up as a shoe/coat cupboard to keep our corridor clear; the kitchen area; and the part of the living area with super-high ceilings that we won’t be able to reach without our builder’s platform. It’s quite surprising how long it takes to paint – we’ve got a pretty good system where I do the edges and John follows with the roller – but we’re limited by the builders’ temporary lighting and so certain parts of the house are too dark to paint in the evenings. We also ran out of primer during prime-time painting on Saturday afternoon, so moved on to actual painting until it was dark enough and late enough to justify stopping, but early enough that B&Q was just about still open for an emergency Saturday-night trip to stock up.
We’ve also started to clean and lightly sand the beams throughout the house – starting with those in the corridor and the living area where we’re painting. It’s made such a difference getting off years of dirt (including the dirt and dust added through the building process) – the beams have scrubbed up so well! It’s a little nerve-wracking reaching the top parts though where the ladder isn’t quite long enough and you have to balance and stretch.
By the end of New Year’s Day, we’ve managed to prime and paint both coats of the back kitchen wall (a lovely dark green to contrast with the ‘cashmere’ beige kitchen), we’ve primed and done the first coat of the boxed-in beam in the dining area, we’ve primed the plant cupboard, the kitchen ceiling area and the walls in the dining/living area and edged part of the corridor. And we’ve cleaned up most of the beams in the corridor and kitchen, ready to be varnished. The poor pup has been very well behaved and thoroughly bored throughout, despite getting extra-special treats to occupy her! Hopefully we can make a bit more progress next week with free evenings and the weekend – it’s so nice to be able to tick an ‘area’ off the list.
Our latest planning notice also came through and is duly now up on the telegraph pole outside our house. This one is to change the front doors from glass (which was in our original planning application but we hadn’t appreciated) to stable doors and to add a new air source heat pump and plant room for our one-bed property. We’re also expecting the sign-off of one of the conditions in a previous application to end up being included – the style of screening for our air source heat pump – as both the approved and new air source heat pump will be next to each other, and with the plant room tucked in behind them. We honestly thought we’d seen the last of the planning process after five applications, but what better way to start a new year than with a new planning application I guess…
On New Year’s Eve we used the excuse of a friend staying to take the day off and go for a long walk around the valley to one of our local pubs The Flintlock Inn in Marsh (the only one that is now open, but that’s a different story!). We had some amazing and atmospheric views despite the drizzle, with a delicious Sunday lunch halfway round at the pub and a nice fire to dry off when we got home. We had started to map some of the walks we do ready for our future guests but this went on the backburner once our build started – we definitely need to find time to pick this up again before we open, as we know from local friends who also rent holiday cottages that one of the primary reasons people come here is for walking in the Blackdown Hills.
We’ve had one other success this week. The weather has been truly awful on certain days, with rain lashing down constantly. After three floods we’ve started getting twitchy about the rain, but luckily the new drain in our yard seems to be coping magnificently with the amount of water coming down. We’ve had to clear it of vegetation and stones (!!) a couple of times but so far so good…
Ley Farm Cottages 