Getting the levels right

On one hand, when you start to talk about carpets you think you’re nearly at the end of the build. But then you look outside and realise there’s still so much to do… 

Our builders have been busy building up the retaining wall between our back garden and the garden for the three-bed barn. As we’re located on a hill, the ground outside our back door is lower than behind the barn which means the two gardens will be at different heights; in addition to this, there’s a further step up into the barn, and so we’re having to raise the level of their garden to create a flat route into the building. All new builds now need to have step-free access as a building regulation – we didn’t realise this when the building was being designed initially, and we’ve kept the existing floor level inside which means the front door opens and steps up where the previous owner laid a damp course and concreted the floor. So we’re using the back door entrance as the one with step-free access. Had we realised this sooner, we’d have considered taking up the floor inside as the step is pretty inconvenient and there’s not much headroom in the kitchen area. Even raising the ground outside, it’s still likely we’ll need a small ramp to get into the back door, although this will be much smaller than if we’d left it at the original level. 

We had to arrange a mid-month site visit with our builders and architect to work out the right ground levels; while they were here we also finalised the design for the stairs up into the communal room, which should take 6-8 weeks to arrive. This gives us a target date to get everything ready to rent out the farmhouse – even when the builders have finished and we’ve moved out, we’re expecting to need to repaint parts and wait for furniture orders to arrive. We had originally anticipated access into the communal room to be via the orchard, but after we pulled the building away from the orchard ground to avoid the cost of a large retaining wall, we needed to find a different solution to get in. We explored putting a ramp up to this door but couldn’t fit one in with the necessary gradient as it would have been too long, so instead we’ve designed stairs of a width that should be suitable for people who are less able, and we’ve put a landing halfway up in accordance to building regulations. 

For the rest of the week, our builders have continued to dig more trenches outside – the latest one will link the farmhouse up to the new sewage treatment plant we’ve installed. Our old septic tank will be disconnected and filled in, which means the intrusive concrete entrance will hopefully be removed! And it’ll be far easier to empty it each year as it’ll be closer to the car park. 

Work is progressing in our new house – we started painting our bedroom, although as the light fittings aren’t in yet (they finally arrived this week) there’s not enough light to paint clean edges in the evenings and we’re limited to painting in the daytime only. Now that the karndean flooring is in, our carpenter has been adding the skirting and architraves throughout the hallways, and it’s looking so much neater. The plumbers have also been building out our ensuite now the vanity top is in, although a faulty shower holder annoyingly means pausing until it can be replaced. And we’ve chosen our carpets – both for the two bedrooms in our new house, and for the top floor landing in the farmhouse where we’ve extended the landing but didn’t have enough leftover stair carpet to cover this space. The bedrooms were fairly easy as we went for neutral colours, but the farmhouse landing was much harder as we’ve had to try and match one of the colours in the original stair carpet so it doesn’t look too out of place. 

The plumbers were also back in the farmhouse to upgrade our bathroom shower from having single taps to a mixer tap and increase the shower head height to maximise the higher ceilings we gained from replacing the rotten roof. The previous shower was pretty feeble in terms of pressure and was so low that anyone taller than 5ft 10in had to bend down – we’ve gained an extra c.10cm which isn’t brilliant but is at least better; and the new taps along with the new Mixergy hot water cylinder should make the pressure stronger. The plumbers got partway through before running out of time, so hopefully we’ll get this finished and ticked off next week. John’s painted the top of the walls where the new plaster was added, although we’ll likely need to redo parts of it as the paint smells like it’s gone off :( 

Our final achievement this week was to order the jar labels for our homemade jam, chutney and jellies. It sounds like a small incidental job but actually it’s been a lengthy process as we’ve had to read and understand the different regulations about food labelling; calculate the %s of each ingredient for each recipe; count how many jars we had of each flavour (so we could order the right number of labels); and then weigh the contents, which meant unpacking all the boxes under the stairs to find a few of each flavour. And then we had to work out the best label size to display all the information in a readable format and look at different suppliers to get the best value for money. Not an easy job, but at least it means we should be ready to start selling some of our produce soon.