This week was the first anniversary since we properly started the building work – it was supposed to take 8 months for the first phase but with all the complications and weather to contend with, it’s turned into a much bigger project than anyone expected. Looking back though, at least you can see a substantial difference! And what better way to celebrate a year than making two significant steps forward…
Monday morning saw a big digger delivered to our yard. Time to bury our spaceship (aka sewage treatment plant) – and what a [wet] week for it. Our builders spent Monday and Tuesday digging an enormous hole in our back garden to-be – so deep that they had to use a ladder to get in and out (which makes sense, the spaceship is massive as it’s designed to cater for the whole site, 23 people, for a year). Disappointingly we missed them moving it from the front yard into the hole as this must have been quite a feat, especially in all the mud. The route between the buildings has been really broken up with all the heavy vehicles and the weather – so much so that when the concrete lorries arrived to fill the void around the spaceship, the concrete had to be tipped into the smaller dumper truck and delivered next to the hole, then picked up and deposited by a second smaller digger. It was fascinating to watch – having to constantly judder the dumper truck to spread the concrete evenly within the dump box and then the precision required using the digger to deposit the concrete without covering the inspection holes. It really can’t have been a fun job, squelching around the site trying not to slip. Our builders have done a great job though, we just hope the concrete has set properly with all the rain we’ve had over the last few days.
With our Ofgem deadline rapidly approaching (this coming Tuesday), everyone has been working flat out to finish installing the heat pumps and heating systems for the two holiday cottages and for our house. We’d originally thought that the builders had left the underfloor heating in the top floor bedrooms in the three-bed barn for a later date, but a quick nosy up there showed that they’ve already laid it. We’ve now got all three hot water cylinders installed (in the right buildings this time) and hooked up, and two out of three of the heat pumps are in place and commissioned. The third heat pump is being hung on the wall of the communal building which is due to happen on Monday – we had to chop some of the fig tree back at the weekend to give enough clearance. Part of our planning approval required appropriate screening, so we’re intending on training the fig tree and apple tree in the front garden in a way that covers it for most of the year.
It’s been so damp recently that we’ve had to delay installing the flooring in our house until the floor dries out – we’ve had the heating on in our new house over the weekend to dry it out and it’s incredible how hot it gets! Each room is on a different heating loop and so has its own thermostat, which should make it easier to avoid heating rooms we’re not using.
Our builders have also finished plasterboarding the first floor of the garage/communal building – the next stage is to plaster the walls but again it’s been such wet weather that everything is too damp. There’s no heating in that building at the moment as we’re using a night storage heater that will be installed later, so at some stage we’ll need to dry it out so we can get onto the next stage (more painting for us, yay!)
We’ve got so many jobs to do ourselves in our new house and in the farmhouse (we still haven’t finished painting the top floor since the builders finished before Christmas) – but had to switch to garden jobs temporarily over the last couple of weeks to avoid falling too far behind. John has made a good re-start though, priming our bedroom in the new house and painting the farmhouse airing cupboard so we can put the shelf back in and move the spare bedding from its temporary location on the landing (yes the house is still in chaos!). We also made a start (finally) tiling the farmhouse bathroom – one of the outcomes of replacing the roof was that the ceiling was raised by about 120mm and so we had a gap around the top of the shower. Luckily we were left enough spare tiles to do this comfortably – but it wasn’t an easy first-ever tiling job because the walls just aren’t straight, and we needed to cut thick clay tiles to fill in the gaps. Cue an investment in an electric tile cutter, which we had great fun using to cut the smaller tiles on Sunday (ably supervised by my dad).
Outside, we replaced the plastic on the second peach/nectarine tree cover (only 3 months late) which is definitely looking more rustic now. The covers are designed to protect the tree from excess rain spreading peach leaf curl fungus which impacts the fruit – we suspect it’s too late for this but we’re hoping we can keep the worst effects at bay if we remove affected leaves quickly enough. Hopefully the covers will last a couple more years as we’ll need to replace them fully when the plastic breaks up next time.
Our vegetable bed covers have also started breaking up sadly – we took the second one off this weekend to clear the beds of weeds, ready to compost them and then cover ahead of planting (again a month later than we should have done). We’re hopeful that we can do remedial repairs this year while we look at a better design for version 2 that doesn’t weaken the wood at the joins. They’ve lasted us three seasons so it’s not the end of the world, but it would be nice if they lasted a bit longer!
Ley Farm Cottages 