Sitting outside at the end of the bank holiday, it’s hard to remember how the week started. We’ve been pretty lucky with the weather over the last few days (save for a drizzly Sunday), but the week itself has been incredibly wet. Our builders were supposed to concrete the footings for the stairs up to the communal games room, having finished digging them and making the shuttering earlier in the week, but Tuesday and Wednesday’s torrential rain meant the holes filled with water and stayed that way until the weekend.
Instead, our builders did as many odd jobs as they could – drilling holes in a brick trough we’re turning into a flower bed; adding skirting (using some leftover bits of the kitchen) to cover the bottom of the wall in the service cupboard; and facing the wall outside our one-bed cottage in feature stone. Annoyingly we still lost a day and a half of productive time – not great at the best of times and definitely not when we’re trying desperately to be ready in time to open for summer…
We did have various trades in this week which has helped with progress. The carpet fitter started fitting both bedroom carpets in our new house and replacing the landing carpet on the top floor of the farmhouse. They look good so far – we’re just waiting for him to come back and put in the connections between the different rooms.
The plumbers have finished off the final bits in our new house – one of the toilets wasn’t quite installed properly which meant the water had been turned off. Now this is fixed and our plumbing has been commissioned – we have water!!
And the plasterers have been incredibly busy – managing to plaster the garage ceiling and the laundry ceilings and walls while it was poor weather, and then putting the base coat of render on the front of the shippon on Friday. It seems strange to see an orange wall all of a sudden!
Safe to say we’ve made the most of the long weekend. We’ve got so many different things on the go that we’ve got a prioritised job list to fit in with our builders’ timescales, while trying to keep on top of the seasonal garden jobs too.
Starting with the shippon – we painted the front doors for our new house and the one-bed cottage, which needed to be done so our builders can put the glass in and get these finished. We had to have wooden doors as a condition of our planning approval – the bottom of one has already got water damage so we’re hoping that can be replaced easily enough. The first coat was an unexpected olive green which was a bit alarming, until the second coat turned out to be the right shade – the paint must have oxidised in the tin overnight. The inside paint has dripped a bit too, so at some point we’ll need to sand those bits off and touch it up. We also started painting the doors for our service cupboard – we’ve brought them into the farmhouse so we can paint them while flat and do a coat in a spare half-hour. Each side needs three coats of paint so it takes a while!
Outside, we cleared our to-be back garden of surface stones and rocks and smoothed it ready for top soil. It was a pretty difficult challenge to smooth great lumps of clay soil, but John came up with the idea of using the drag mat behind the mower (usually used to spread soil for grass seed) which worked incredibly well. We had planned to do the same in the garden for the three-bed but after Sunday the ground was just too wet – we need to wait for it to dry out a bit first. We also treated the old barn door frame for the three-bed with wood hardener to preserve it a bit longer – we want to keep the original material as long as possible and this frame was highlighted in our archaeological survey as likely being from more than 200 years ago when the barn was first built, so we’ve incorporated it into the design for the new barn.
John has done an amazing job priming the communal games room, despite there being no access stairs! It’s a much bigger room than you realise, but he’s still managed to edge the entire space and start priming the ceiling as well. We thought this could be done after we’ve got the farmhouse ready, but we realised that we need to paint it before the builders finish on site so the electrics can be put in and the kitchenette installed. It’s turning out to be a really big job, so hopefully I can take a day off next week to break the back of it between us.
We also made the most of the dry weather to get through a few jobs in the garden. While our priority is getting everything done that our builders need us to do, our second list is full of jobs to get the farmhouse ready to rent. So this weekend we finished the patio with the final slab that our builders kindly cut in half for us, and then put chippings around the outside to finish it off. I’d forgotten to bury the hose the first time round, so we had to take out half of the stones and redo them. Part of the garden wall had been totally overgrown with ivy over the years so we removed most of that – unearthing a rotten gate post that had been left from when the farm had been a working farm. And we moved the sacks of garden waste that had been left from cutting back hedges earlier in the year so the space is ready to lay a brick path between the flowers at some point soon.
Our next job was to remove an old flimsy arch we’d put over the path to the orchard and replace it with a new, sturdier one. The old one had fallen apart previously and got in the way with the building work, so it had been abandoned behind the greenhouse with jasmine still growing round it (and also rooting in the runner bean sacks). The new one looks much nicer and frames the end of the path – hopefully the jasmine will bush out and cover it. We’ve got two more arches to put along the route to so it should be a really lovely walk to the orchard and games room.
And finally I caught up a bit with seed planting and potting on our seedlings – the conservatory is now filled with plants and seed trays. We tidied up the cold frame and removed the ants that had been inhabiting it; the window panes have suffered a fair bit over winter and will need repainting when it’s dry. Maybe we need to look for a cover for next winter….
Ley Farm Cottages 
It’s amazing how much you managed to get done despite the weather. It’s going to look lovely when you have finished. Be careful painting the ceiling. It looks ever so high.
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