And we have flooring…

We have flooring in our new house! It was due to go down a couple of weeks ago but the wet weather meant the house was too damp and needed to dry out first. It’s been holding up most of the remaining jobs that can’t be done until the floor is down, so when the team arrived on Wednesday we were pretty excited – and they’ve done a lovely job too. We’ve gone for karndean flooring following a friend’s recommendation – it’s more hard-wearing than wood, and cheaper too – even though it feels like wood to touch. It’s great to get another step done – although now we need to be careful it doesn’t get dirty or damaged while the rest of the building work continues. 

We spent most of the weekend in our new house, touching up patches in the ensuite and the service cupboard, and priming the cupboard doors. Where we’d painted inside the service cupboard previously, the interim heating solution that our builders had put in to dry the floors after the flooding was still there. When they switched it out for the real thing it left patches of unpainted wall – not easy to paint between all the pipes without getting paint everywhere! We also caulked the gaps around the beams where the plasterer hadn’t been able to reach and cleaned the beam in the bedroom again before painting the steel beam – even though we cleaned all the beams thoroughly over Christmas they’re all incredibly dusty already. We’re hoping this is because of the building work rather than normal, as it’ll be difficult to get up there and clean regularly without ladders. 

Our main job was to paint the bedroom ceilings (previously only primed) – these are the final two rooms left (other than touching up where we’ve already painted). It involved a lot of going up and down ladders and the platform because of the height and the need to paint around the beams so it took a lot longer than we expected, but we managed to finish both coats by Sunday lunchtime. We’ve found ceilings particularly demoralising to paint because you can’t really see much of a difference, so it’s good to get it over and done with, especially as we finished it in time to get a few jobs in the garden done (which has been severely neglected for months now). 

Outside, our site manager has been busy this week sorting out the water supply. South West Water came out to site in September 2022 to check out the mains water pipe that runs through our wood and find the optimal place to tap into for our new barns. Needless to say, the blue paint they sprayed on the ground has disappeared since then, but we’ve been marking the location with a brick (despite John running over it with the lawn mover several times). Our site manager started by digging down till he found the pipe (2 metres deep!) and then dug a trench back through the wood to a location in front of the garage, where South West Water will install water meters for each barn, and then connect these up to the water supply pipes that have already been laid to each building. He’s laid the pipe from the wood to this point and filled up the trenches again to make the site accessible – leaving each end open but covering the one in the wood with a fence so the dog doesn’t fall down it. He took the turf off when he dug the trench very carefully and has thoughtfully replaced it to limit the damage done – although the rest of the grass/moss has turned to mud because of the digger anyway, so we now have a stretch of grass in amongst the mud.  

Before this though, he started by digging a drainage trench for the gutter and drainpipe from the garage/communal building to connect to, to take rainwater off the roof and away from the courtyard. It’s very carefully located next to the water supply pipes and at a higher depth. It’s fascinating to see the order in which services are installed and how they’re layered, each time a trench is dug and filled in, then the next one is dug at a slightly shallower depth and filled in, etc. It does make you stop and think though – construction must be a particularly tough and lonely job at times – our site manager mostly been working on his own this week, squelching around a huge sea of mud that just sticks to your boots and is difficult to clean off – it’s not a nice environment to be in. Hopefully now the floor is down, our carpenter will be back soon – and the MET office aren’t forecasting any rain till the end of the week, so the ground might start to dry out and be more accessible. 

We managed to finish a couple more ‘high priority’ jobs this week – one of them being to finish painting the garage before the solar tiles are connected up (this will involve installing lots of cables that it would be a nightmare to paint around). John’s been hard at work painting seemingly all week to get both coats on the walls, which has taken almost 20 litres of paint. We still haven’t had an update from our solar tile company about whether National Grid have formally agreed to our install and therefore when the connection can go ahead, which does make us wonder why this was an urgent job; having said that, it’s better for it to be painted and ready than to be rushing it and not have time to finish. We live in hope that National Grid will respond soon (it’s been well over 2 months since the application was first chased, so they’ve had it even longer, and were working to a 4-6 week timeline back then) so we can get the solar connected up. We’ve learnt though that working in construction requires a significant amount of patience!! 

The other priority job was to finish the tiling in the farmhouse bathroom that my dad helped us start over Christmas. We had the opportunity to raise the ceiling when our builders replaced the rotten roof back in the summer, which we gratefully did as anyone above 6ft wouldn’t have fit in the shower, but it meant taking off the top half-row of tiles and replacing them with new tiles. It’s been hard to find the time with everything else we’ve had to do – but over the last month we’ve filled in the gaps in the wall left from taking off the old tiles, sanded most of it off after we found we’d over-filled it, put the first full row of tiles in, bought a new electric tile cutter to cut the tiles (impossible any other way with these tiles), measured up and cut bits of tile for the very top row, glued these on the wall, and finally this weekend grouted between them. It’s a huge weight off our mind to get this done as we can now get on with painting the room, and the plumbers can install the new mixer shower. 

We still have a few more ‘high priority’ jobs on our to-do list, but we’ve managed to clear seven this week alone, which is a great feeling of relief. Now time to see what ‘medium priority’ jobs need to move up…