Another big job ticked off this week – the plasterers tackled the upstairs room of the communal building. It’s a fairly large room, half with a tall pitched roof and half with a flat roof that hosts one of our bat lofts above it. It’s also not easy to access with equipment and materials as you have to traipse up the drive to the farmhouse, then out to the orchard (along our lovely brick path) and clamber up some planks. It took most of the week but they’ve done a lovely job and the plaster is now drying out ready for us to prime it.
Our builders have continued to dig the trench up to the farmhouse septic tank to connect it to the new sewage treatment plant. It’s been a tough job getting through the orchard and cutting through the tree roots. It turns out that the utility soakaway (namely the washing machine) drains out into the orchard soil without any proper soakaway solution, so the ground has been full of stagnant water, which our builders found when they dug into it. Not a pleasant experience by any means, so it’s good that we’re moving the washing machine down to the laundry, preventing future water build-up.
South West Water also arrived on site on Monday to connect the new barns’ water supply up to the mains and install our new water meters. Finishing this job meant that our builders could fill in the hole left in our wooded area, and plumb in the wastewater pipes from the communal building, which are located above the clean water pipes and cross the yard between the communal building and the other barns. Once both of these jobs had been done, our builders were able to backfill the muddy trenches and cover it with stones to make it more stable underfoot and far more traversable. It’s been fascinating to see the extent of the groundworks required for our project and the skills required to get each pipe at the right depth and installed in the right order.
Now the clean water has been connected up, it means we have water in our new house! The plumbers have been back this week making progress in our ensuite – we now have almost everything fitted in there except the mirror and shower screen (which we need to change as the supplier measured the space wrong and gave us one that’s far too large for the space). They also came into the farmhouse to finish the changes in our bathroom – we have a new shower and new taps installed which look much more modern than the previous ones and come with the added benefit that they don’t leak!
If this wasn’t enough, our builders have also finished building the retaining garden wall for the three-bed barn. It’s a bit higher than I’d expected, but nothing that can’t be hidden by plants. We’ll be using the sheltered space between the wall and our new house as a wood store so the higher the wall is here, the better! Our carpenter has been finishing off installing skirting boards around our new lounge / dining room, and continued adding bits to our kitchen. He’s done a very nice job of cutting the cornice to fit around the steel beam which is a little lower than we’d anticipated. And the roofers have been back to put the slates and tiles on the two outbuildings for the heating equipment, which are now nearly finished and are looking very smart. Even if we can’t actually see the roof of the one next to the shippon…
We had a break on Saturday and took friends on a trial walk two valleys across to a fabulous local pub – a nice 11 mile walk that would have been better without the hailstorm just as we left! Luckily the food, views and sunshine (on the return leg) made up for it, with the general consensus of a fabulous walk and two exhausted pooches in the evening. The sunnier weather on Sunday meant we could catch up on some of the vastly-overdue garden jobs – planting out seedlings, putting sand on our brick garden path, cutting back bushes and mowing the lawns around the house (we still can’t access the orchard with the mower and that grass is horrendously overdue a cut!!).
Ley Farm Cottages 