A week of windows, roofs and walls

This feels like a week of milestones, starting with the windows and doors being installed in the three-bed cottage (this is the final building to have them). The peak of excitement was when the large windows went in in place of the threshing doors as they had to be craned into position – the back one looked pretty spectacular when the crane ended up right over the barn! It’s made such a difference inside having all that light coming in, it’s going to be a fabulous building when it’s finished. Our builders have come up with a design that also lets us keep the old barn door frames – the archaeological report we had done said the back frame was likely an original so we’re very pleased they’ve managed to keep this. They’ve also turned the hayloft hatch into a lovely shutter, so we retain the barn look and feel.  

Then we had our solar tiles installed onto our garage/communal building. We’re expecting to use a lot of power in this building as it contains the laundries for both the business and for our guests as well as a games/communal room, and in future we’ll have EV chargers powered from this building. We’re still waiting for National Grid to confirm how much power we’re actually allowed to generate – they have the ability to limit both the amount of power we generate and the amount of power we export, and despite having the system transformer upgraded, we’re still on a rural power network that has limitations. As we’ve rebuilt this building from the ground up, it’s also the best opportunity to install solar tiles, before we put in a perfectly good slate roof that we would then need to remove later. 

The scaffolding around the building has limited the access around to the back of the barns – now the final step (installing the roof) has been completed, the scaffolding should be able to come down and we will be able to get equipment and machinery through. John has been busy painting the fascia boards again while the builders have added the gutters and down pipes onto the building – frustratingly the paint on the fascias has continued to flake, so we’ll have to find a long ladder and have another go when the weather’s a bit warmer.  

The aim is for the air source heat pumps to be installed next week, so one of the builders’ jobs was to prepare the concrete base around the side of the shippon, for the heat pumps for the one-bed cottage and our house will go (in addition to the services outbuilding for the one-bed). The concrete was poured on Tuesday while we had some dry weather!! Our builders have also been working on the services outbuilding for the three-bed – it’s looking amazingly sturdy with thick insulated walls and has been put together really well. 

Our new house is coming along very well. Our service cupboard now has doors and the start of an architrave, while our carpenter has also created boxing around the pipes in our ensuite and included a little storage cupboard – ready for when the company we visited last week come to measure up for the vanity unit top. We also moved the beam down there for the lounge light as we wanted to check the colour and stain the other beams in that space a similar colour. The fittings to hang it also arrived this week, so hopefully it’ll be up in the next couple of weeks, and we’ll be able to see if it’s as good as we envisaged! 

After a fairly intensive few weeks, painting every weekend and almost every evening, we’ve broken the back of the painting in our new house. We needed to get all the high surfaces done before the karndean flooring goes in as the platform would damage the floor, and we also have to allow enough time for the electrician to hang the lights. Having finished the ceilings last weekend, this week we concentrated on the walls in the lounge and corridor. It took us ages to choose the colours – we knew roughly what we wanted but it was hard narrowing them down, especially in the open-plan kitchen/living area as there are several different existing colours to match with, and different combinations of natural light, artificial light, and a mix of both. We picked up a load of samples and moved them around different parts of the house at different times of the day – even then we changed our mind last minute to go with a lighter yellow for the corridor.

We weren’t sure we’d got the right shade for the living area at first as we were painting in the evening and the builders’ lights made it look too yellow (we were aiming for a warm beige). But it looks quite different during the day, and once we’d stained the lounge beams around it, it seems to look a little browner. We also found time to paint the steel beams a dark brown, so they look a bit softer and fit in better with the surroundings. We still have some touching up to do, and we’ve barely started the bedrooms, but it feels like we’re making good progress.