Work on the Cow Shed continues 

Our builders returned to work on the Cow Shed last week and have made impressive progress. Dean – our carpenter – has continued to build the rest of the stud walls around the living space and in the bedroom, including building the frame for our built-in cupboard that will house the electrical consumer unit and the household cleaning items. And we’ve also had the electricians on site installing all the cables in the walls. They estimate they’ve laid roughly 700m throughout the property, which seems rather a lot for a one-bed! They’ve done a very nice job though, drilling small holes in the beams and feeding the cables through to keep them contained. 

We’ve also had the chimney sweep and woodburner installer round to advise on the right location for the flue (allowing for a fireproofed wall) and the roof beam adjustments required to support the flue. They’ve been liaising with the woodburner manufacturer to check official guidance for us – we want to put the woodburner as close to the wall as possible to avoid losing space unnecessarily but we also need to make sure there’s no fire risk! We’ve had good advice on different materials we could use so we should have reasonable options. 

Our first guests of 2026 left on Friday after arriving on the Sunday after new year to celebrate two family birthdays and left us the loveliest thank you card – and a yummy chunk of birthday cake!! So thoughtful of them 😊 It really does make all the effort worthwhile when we hear how much our guests enjoyed their stay.  

John’s had fun with the council this week – firstly trying to sort out our rubbish collection as they missed the post-Christmas-and-New-Year collection last week (apparently they had too much rubbish to collect so just missed our village!). Then he’s been trying to sort out the council tax payments so we’re paying the right amount on the Shippon and the Farmhouse. We’ve been trying to switch the Farmhouse onto business rates for a year now (we’re still waiting) so for now the Farmhouse is being counted as a second home with a 100% premium applied to our council tax. It’s crazy to think that these are normal backlogs for the Government’s Valuation Office while the government are also proposing changes to high value properties that will require them all to be re-valued. 

We also finally made it away for a long weekend (the first in almost two years) – taking our chance in the low season when we didn’t have any bookings to have a break. Typically we managed to book a property in Cornwall, arriving the day after Storm Goretti came through – leaving our cottage without power. The owner let us know before we arrived so we could be prepared but unfortunately we were only expecting (and planned for) two days without power. We’re now on our fourth and final evening and still don’t have power which has been really frustrating, especially as we’re not in control of resolving the situation and since the main house and their other rental cottage are fine. It’s certainly given us food for thought for when issues arise in our Farmhouse – we aim to keep our guests fully informed about what steps we’re taking to resolve things, and we always make sure our guests have an alternative (such as paying for a takeaway when the aga broke). It does feel like our experience here has been lacking those extra (yet critical) aspects that make it a 5-star holiday experience – it has given John an incentive though to investigate getting our cottage regraded from a 4-star to a 5-star as we believe we go far beyond what we’ve had here!