It turns out the best way of stopping weeks of relentless rain is to finish installing a drainage system… We’ve had real issues with excess water and the occasional flooding over the last few months, so it was a relief when our builders installed the last of the main drainage system across our site (with just one final overflow channel to complete). The drain covers are now levelled and this week they finished bricking them in place; the sewage treatment plant pump has been concreted in; and the aco drain has been put in place and is ready for concreting when the rest of the yard is redone. So of course now we’ve had the best weather of the year, a full week of sunshine. I’m sure it won’t be too long before they’re tested out though.
At least the good weather means the ground has started drying out. The mud is disappearing and our site manager has been able to fill in the various holes across the site and start tidying things up. The wood has recovered fairly well and the grass is starting to reappear in patches, although the orchard is still looking pretty miserable, and the area behind our new house is mostly huge clumps of clay, although our builders have put stone down round the house where we’re planning to add a patio at some point. It’s a good time of year for seeding lawns, so we’re just working out if we have time to get a delivery of top soil and grass seed – it’s a pretty intense few weeks for the best results and we have quite a lot on at the moment.
Our builders have also made progress in our garage and laundry, insulating and boarding the ceilings and the stud wall that separates our laundry from the guest laundry. While we’ve designed all three rooms (our garage, our laundry and the guest laundry) on paper, it’s been quite hard to visualise the spaces while they had open ceilings and no dividing walls, but it’s certainly starting to come to life now.
We had our monthly site meeting as well, where we talk through progress, decisions we need to make, and what’s coming up. This time our builders asked for another extension, this time until the end of May. The first phase of the project was originally expected to take 8 months, now it’s 7 months beyond the original finish date. All the delays are for valid reasons (the constant bad weather, needing to replace rotten roofs, waiting for the flood damage to dry, etc) but we didn’t envisage it would take this long when we first started. We’re getting closer to moving into our new house and therefore being able to get the farmhouse ready to rent out, but time is ticking by and the summer season is getting ever closer…
Having been away this weekend celebrating a friends’ wedding, we’ve not had that much time to get through jobs. Those that we have done have been mainly finishing off things we’ve done before – like a second layer of grout on the patio, and a third round of sand in our brick path. We removed the remaining doors in our new house so we could prime behind the hinges and started sanding the woodwork, ready for a mega-weekend of painting next weekend. John also found time to paint the first coat on the top floor landing of the farmhouse – we’d prioritised the bedrooms ready for people staying but had left the rest of the top floor, so it’s feeling great to make a start on this.
The big excitement this week was seeing our jam in our local milk vending machine! Some of the local farmers set up a milk vending machine shed two and a half years ago (where you can get amazing milkshakes!), and they’ve gradually added extra produce including eggs, cheese and chutney. They’ve agreed to try our jam to see if it sells – it would be fantastic to make a bit of money from our cooking efforts so hopefully it proves popular!
Ley Farm Cottages 