This week we reached our fifth anniversary of living in Devon. It definitely doesn’t feel that long! Each year we’ve made progress renovating the property – be that updating the Farmhouse, restoring and reclaiming areas outside, or converting outbuildings in various stages of decline into homes (again at various stages of the process!). This year though seems like the biggest step as we finally finished the first stage of building work, moved into our new home in the Shippon and officially started our new business. To date we’ve had 222 adults stay in the Farmhouse, accompanied by 28 children, 6 infants and 56 dogs – and we have a further 18 future bookings in the diary. We’ve learnt a lot along the way and consider ourselves very lucky with our guests – with only one bad experience and most guests leaving the house clean and tidy.
This week also starts our stretch of summer holiday visitors – with back-to-back bookings now until the end of September. John spent the week deep cleaning the Farmhouse as we’ll now only have 6 hours each week between bookings which is completely taken up with normal cleaning. He’s also tidied up outside – cutting back hedges and trees, and mowing everywhere. It makes such a difference.
We spent the first part of the week doing work in our back garden. This is usually at the bottom of our to-do list so we decided to rope in some help and take a couple of days off to focus on preparing and concreting our new greenhouse base and the foundations for a stone-faced block flower bed that’ll act as a retaining wall for the three-bed barn garden. We started digging on Sunday afternoon and managed to get most of it finished by the end of Monday. My dad did a fantastic job directing us and checking all the levels, and figuring out the practical aspects that we hadn’t considered. He couldn’t help but get stuck in making the shuttering and with some digging too! We lined the base of both with gravel from the kitchen garden – pre-empting one of our winter jobs which is to replace the gravel with brick to reduce the weeds and make it quieter when our guests are round the corner in the back garden.
Tuesday we concreted – and by mid-morning it was obvious we hadn’t ordered enough ballast or concrete despite thorough measurements and calculations. We managed to finish the greenhouse base and then made a mad dash in all 3 cars to Jewsons in Chard to pick up emergency supplies of 30 bags of ballast and 4 more concrete. Somehow we got both areas done within the two days – we’re so pleased to have it done and ready for the next stage. The greenhouse base is also in place – concreted into the ground and ready to build the frame.
We had then hoped to build the greenhouse itself on Sunday, but adding the rubber tubing to each piece was so fiddly it took much longer than expected. We managed to build most of the frame, which is currently in sections in the garden waiting to be finished off. Since we have the Yarcombe Terrier Races taking priority this week, it’ll likely be there a little longer!! Our chilli plants are eagerly awaiting their new warmer home with more space!
Ley Farm Cottages 