The final weathertight touches

Two more tasks this week and now all of our buildings are now weathertight. The garage and laundry were both missing doors but as our builders finished installing the ceiling and walls last week, we needed to get the doors on too. At some point we’ll stain them but we couldn’t choose a colour that would fit in without seeing them in situ, so our builders have treated them for the time being and we’ll add that to our ever-growing to do list.

They’ve also added the final weathertight touches to the three-bed barn – now renamed “the Old Barn” seeing as though the new barn (the garage/laundry/communal games room) is now up and running. While the windows were installed a couple of months ago, one of them still had gaps around the window frame that needed to be filled. Our builders have now filled these – the next step will be to cover these with the door frame that was there previously. We want to keep as much of the heritage as possible and as the North-facing wood is thought to be an original fitting, we’re going to make some necessary repairs and put it back in front of the window frame. The slate window sills have now been installed too – our builders have done a fantastic job with these.

Progress continues with the external works. Another length of aco drain has been installed in front of the shippon (we thought they’d finished this last week!) and our builders have been putting stone down around it ahead of concreting. They’ve also put stone down round the back of the shippon in the areas we’ll be paving first, so it’s a firmer and more stable surface. And the final bit of scaffolding has been taken down at the back of the new barn (which was giving us short-term access to the communal games room) so the area can be prepped ready for the stairs to be installed. They’ll require concrete pads on the ground level and also in the orchard, as we’ll have two flights of stairs – one starting on ground level near the laundry, and another that guests staying at the farmhouse will be able to use. We’re also installing gabion baskets against the orchard bank to stop it collapsing in future, so John has spent a good chunk of Sunday collecting stone from across the site to fill them with.

All of this means that we’ve finally regained mower access to the orchard and wood – neither have been mowed since the autumn and they were in desperate need of being done – the wood in particular had just gone wild and parts had been taken over by cow parsley. They look so much better now!

Our new house feels like it’s inching along too. The electricians have been on site again to do a few more jobs in the kitchen – installing the extractor fan and adding lights beneath the kitchen cupboards. And the screen has been installed in our shower – this was delayed as the original one Easy Bathrooms included in their design was far too long. We’ve spent most of the weekend sanding down the skirting boards and architraves to try and get a smooth finish, which is harder than it seems and in some places annoyingly impossible. We prioritised the two bedrooms ahead of the carpet going down next week – safe to say painting woodwork is not the most fun way to spend a weekend! It looks like a third coat may be required in some places as well…

The carpet fitter is also replacing the landing carpet in the farmhouse – where we’ve extended the landing to add in the bathroom, we didn’t have enough original carpet to fill the gap, and we’re having to replace the whole thing as we couldn’t match it. John finished painting the walls to minimise the amount of painting required when the new carpet is down – it’s amazing how much cleaner and fresher it looks. We still need to do the woodwork and the ‘feature niche’ – more jobs going onto the to-go list. Lucky we’ve got a couple of long weekends coming up!