This happens to be our 300th blog – I’m truly amazed we’ve found something to write about each week (although some may suggest we’ve been scraping the barrel at times!!). At least now the Cow Shed build is in full swing the developments are a bit more interesting.
It’s been a busy week for our builders – with three trades on site. The plumbers arrived to do the plumbing first fix in the shower room and the kitchen. We now have pipes running within the stud walls, pipework up to the bottom of the toilet and sink in the bathroom, and the shower controls are in. Dean, our builder, installed the soil vent pipe for the toilet with some impressive manoeuvring required to avoid the structural beam that inconveniently happened to be right in the way! The extra work required to achieve this didn’t get in his way though as he’s now insulated most of the walls as well.
Our electricians completed their first fix – putting in all the required wiring and then adding in socket boxes and switch boxes into the stud walls. They’ve done a pretty good job getting them straight as well – there are only a couple where the boxes are slightly wonky and they’ll need to make the most of the adjustable lugs in the boxes themselves.
Openreach also arrived this week to install the data cable into the Cow Shed (we’ve designed each property to have its own broadband connection to avoid any bandwidth issues). It seems that they may have turned up proactively as no-one seemed to be aware of their arrival – I wouldn’t be surprised as John managed to find a very eager engineer during the last phase of our build who kept in touch, asking how we were getting on and when we’d be ready for the next cottage. It feels great to have made so much progress!
Our builder Dean had a second job this week – installing 11 new acroprops into the Elizabethan cottage lean-to. If you missed our previous blog, we’d noticed that the stone wall of the back lean-to of our listed original farmhouse had started to fall apart just before winter. As this lean-to protects the original cob wall dating back 450 years, it’s critical that we maintain the structure to avoid weather getting to the cob. We had a structural engineer visit in December to advise us on the best course of action – he suggested propping up the roof to take the strain off the walls and then rebuilding the wall, which we agreed to do.
Since putting the acroprops in place, a larger part of the wall has collapsed now the weight of the roof has been lifted and there’s no tension on the stones. This means we need to take the next action fairly quickly to rebuild the wall before any damage is done. The structural engineer is now trying to find an architect experienced in old buildings to figure out how much work we need to do to rebuild the lean-to to make it structurally sound for future development, but without doing too much work now in case regulations or best practice changes by the time we actually get round to restoring the building. We need to put in an application for Listing Building Consent to do the interim remedial work – we’re hoping that as this is a listed building the council will approve it quickly so work can commence as soon as the weather picks up.
We had two last-minute bookings come through last weekend – the first for this coming week with a same-day changeover on Friday for the second booking. It’s not often that we get a week-only stay so we’ve spent our spare time this weekend getting everything ready for both guests – anything to minimise the work required during a same day changeover! It’s great to see the Farmhouse full at the end of January – typically the quietest week of the year. Here’s hoping we get a few more February bookings soon!
Ley Farm Cottages 