More fit-out progress

We made more fit-out progress this week. In the garage and laundry rooms the concrete floor was poured, and will be sanded down once it’s dried. The next stage will be to insulate and add the ceiling and the walls between our laundry and the guest laundry. We’re still waiting for National Grid to approve the installation of the solar tiles on our roof so we can put the first inverter into the garage and use the power we’re generating. It’s really frustrating as our solar tile suppliers started the conversation with them back in November and yet for some reason we’re getting nowhere and it’s not clear why. We made the decision in January to go ahead and install the tiles anyway because of ‘positive conversations’ between our solar tile supplier and National Grid with a very short timescale promised – and because waiting would have held up progress as the scaffolding was blocking the route into the back of the site. We would have been at least 3 months behind now if we’d waited, but it’s still irritating to know we’re generating power and because the cables aren’t connected up we’re then having to spend money to use electricity from the grid. We’re now contacting our solar tile installer weekly to see if that helps speed things up… 

This also doesn’t include the second inverter required for both the barn and the farmhouse – this is held up for a different reason. As we’ll be generating more power at peak than the grid can handle on our rural power supply, we need a new design of inverter that constrains what can be exported back to the grid. This inverter is still going through product approval – so until this is done we’re only able to use one half of each roof. So much for encouraging more renewable forms of electricity! 

The finishing touches are gradually being added to our new house as well. The electricians have been in and installed the bedroom lights in both rooms, although we want to retie the rope in our bedroom with a different knot. Our kitchen is looking more complete – the cupboard handles (kindly donated by some friends of ours) have been fitted and look amazing – and the appliances are now in as well.  

And in our farmhouse, we finally got round to putting up the curtain rail in our yellow bedroom in time for a family visit and to make the bedroom toddler-friendly – although having looked at the stains on the curtain we inherited, we will need to invest in a new curtain and some side hooks before we rent the place out! Years of a poorly-insulated room have not been kind to the curtains, not even the dry cleaners could get the mould stains out. 

Our builders have spent a good couple of days clearing the courtyard and site of all the materials that had stacked up over the last year – mainly items we’d hoped to be able to reuse for certain ‘projects’ and just hadn’t had time to start. They’ve also concreted in the cabling for the sewage treatment pump that they installed last week. One of the next jobs is to dig in the electrical cables for the Electric Vehicle car chargers which will go against the garden wall. Our site manager has also been flattening our new back garden a bit, although I suspect it’s still too wet to do anything too meaningful. Surely this rain can’t continue!  

We made the most of having my older brother helping this weekend and started two outdoor jobs that are high on our priority list. The first was to start replacing the gravel in the farmhouse back garden with slabs and a brick path. The original gravel space we inherited was unusable and is terrible in the winter months as the clay soil sticks to your boots and then collects gravel which you walk in everywhere, making a real mess. We’ve moved the gravel from the first half of the area (where the slabs will go) to a flower bed behind the terrace wall that was previously full of weeds; and then filled the area with sand to level it (I think the pup thought we were at the beach again as she kept burying her ball in the sand!). Hopefully we’ll get to lay the slabs next week. 

Our other job was to start prepping the area in front of the air source heat pump in the front garden. Our listed building planning permission condition requires us to hide the heat pump from view, and rather than have something fake we’re going to train the fig and apple trees either side of it across the front, and fill the gap with wild flowers. It’s been full of weeds since we moved in, with added rubble from building the new barn, so it was a bit of a mess to clear. It’ll look so much better when we’ve finished though. 

It’s not been all work this week – having some of our family to stay meant we had the opportunity to visit the local area and pick up more ideas to recommend to our guests. It’s been lovely to recognise that the local pub and children’s playground means we have entertainment on our doorstep, as well as having always-popular places like Lyme Regis, and (for runners!) the parkrun at Seaton not too far away.