A new wall (well rendered anyway)

A week of beautiful weather resulted in a significant amount of progress. The week started with the plasterers finishing the rendering on the front of the shippon. We temporarily now have a bright orange wall until we paint the base coat and then the mortar paint as agreed with the council – it’s hard to see how such a bright wall will end up a buttermilk colour without a significant amount of painting!

After last week’s disastrous rain, it was dry enough that our builders were finally able to pour the concrete for the stair footings (not before one of them had to bail out the remaining water with a pot). They’ve done a wonderful job – adding a fancy concrete footing at the end of the stairs – a float finish with a smooth trowelled finish along the edges. The stairs themselves have been delayed a couple of times – hopefully they should arrive on Tuesday. It’ll be nice to be able to walk into the communal games room now instead of having to climb a ladder up there. Our builders have also built the crates for the gabions that will hold the orchard ground back (to be filled when the stairs are in place), and installed a drain underneath where they’ll go.

We had our first delivery of topsoil on Friday – which our builder very kindly moved into our to-be back garden and spread for us. It’s the first of a few lorry loads we need, but it feels like the end is getting close if we’re thinking about creating our garden – for the first phase at least. John spent some of the weekend clearing surface stones in the back garden of the three-bed barn in readiness for the next load. Even though we’re not finishing the internal works for that barn for a while, it’ll make the site look better with a bit of a garden there, especially as it’s the right time of year to be sowing grass seed.

We’ve made progress in other areas too. Our builders have put the old barn door frame back into place – this is the one that the archaeological survey said was likely an original feature from when the barn was built over 200 years ago, and that John treated last week. It needed a bit of a shove because the treatment had worked too well and hardened the wood slightly wider than the gap! And they’ve installed the glass panes in our front doors now the render has been finished (these were left in case they got damaged during the rendering). The carpet fitter also finished off fitting the carpets both in the farmhouse and in our new house. This seemed to clinch the deal with our pup, who’s not been particularly fond of our new house since we were painting at height over Christmas and the platform we were using made a terrible racket. The excitement when she found the new carpets was too much and she ended up having a little nap!

The last of our utilities are mostly progressing. Openreach arrived to install the new broadband connections from the main line into the site, which is the final step before connecting the supplies up to each individual cottage. Our electricity company was also supposed to come out and switch one of our meters for a polyphase meter – we need a bigger meter to allow us to have both solar panels and a heat pump in the three-bed and the communal barn. Annoyingly and for the second time the appointment was cancelled – we’ve rebooked now for a week on Monday so let’s hope the saying is true and it’s third time lucky…

We’ve had a busy week – taking Friday off work to try and catch up with the copious amount of painting we have to do. John finished priming the communal games room, which was such a big job it took a week, and we managed to stain the top ceiling beam and finish both coats of paint on the ceiling too. It definitely makes you realise how much more surface area a pitched ceiling has! I also painted more of the woodwork in our new house. We’re nowhere near finished but I focused on the architraves so we can hang the doors again next week, which will feel like another step closer. And we started priming the garage ceiling and the guest laundry so we can get the ceilings painted and the electricians can get the spotlights in. At least with a few different rooms to be painted, it gives a bit of variety.

We’ve been trying to keep the garden going along with everything else but it’s not proving easy, as is obvious when you see the sheer number of weeds in our flower beds. We managed to top up the potatoes this week and applied the first slug nematodes of the season before the slugs ate all our broad bean plants. Hopefully this means we can soon plant out some of the vegetable plants we grew earlier in the year and make space for the smaller seedlings that desperately need to be potted on.

With the storm approaching tomorrow and the risk of flooding again (last time the drain overflowed it flooded the ‘service shed’ with all the heating and hot water equipment for the one-bed cottage, although the shippon itself survived), we’re testing out some barriers along the drainage channel to catch the rocks and debris that comes down from the hill and through the farm above us. The main question is whether they catch enough debris to stop blocking the drain at the bottom of the channel but still let the water through without it overflowing onto the lawn. Some close observation required tomorrow!