Another mini-milestone completed this week. Building on the momentum from finishing the ceilings last week, and having committed to spending every Saturday decorating, we started on the living area walls. It wasn’t anywhere near as intensive as the ceilings and so we decided to finish them on Sunday, ticking another stage off. We’ve also chosen the paint for the end wall, and are planning to choose the bedroom paint this evening before the B&Q paint offer finishes tomorrow! It’s just so hard to make a decision.
With our allotted ‘garden’ time we’ve made a bit of progress. John’s done a great job weeding the pots outside the shippon and the rhubarb patch and vegetable beds in the kitchen garden. Soon the beds will be ready to compost and plant up with seedlings when the nights warm up. I’ve been balancing potting up seedlings and planting new seeds to fill the empty module trays – I’ve now managed to get to March’s seed box, which makes me feel so far behind. I went to see my parents this week too, and they’re much further ahead with their garden! I uncovered and moved into the cold frame today – previously covered with a tarpaulin to limit winter weather damage. Despite the fact we’ve used external paint to cover it, some of it’s peeling off. It’s going to be frustrating if we need to repaint it every year!
We also took down the polythene covers off the peach and nectarine tree – which are placed there over winter to stop the fungal ‘peach leaf curl’ infection (which is rain-borne). The trees are looking a bit sorry for themselves – in fact the whole area including the fruit cage isn’t great. The nectarine tree has silver leaf – a different type of fungal infection that we had tried to cut away last year but has now affected the whole tree. And the peach tree, redcurrant bush and blackcurrants bush all have fungal infections. We’ve cut off what we can, and have sprayed with fungal spray, but I fear it’s got too tight a grip now. We’re just hoping we don’t need to replace the trees…
We’ve not had anyone in the Farmhouse since Easter so John’s been doing a few bits in there to keep it looking nice. He’s deep cleaned the aga and painted the wall behind the lounge woodburner. The latter was much needed as the chimney leaks slightly when it rains from a certain direction and leaves streaky stains on the wall. It mostly comes off with a bit of cif but now it’s looking clean and fresh again.
As we expand our cottages we also need to add more cupboards to the laundry for storage, and additional appliances to keep on top of the washing. It’ll all go into our laundry rather than the guest laundry – there’s not much space though and it’s going to make the room a little cramped, so we’ve been measuring carefully and working out how to maximise the area we have. We finally nearly pressed ‘go’ on the order this week, having gone back and forth multiple times on the design, and then paused when we remembered we still have bits left over from the original fit-out. We’re hoping we can reuse some of the leftover bits – and also want to make sure we know why they weren’t used in the first place before we end up buying bits we don’t need. So now we have to find time to check through all that now before we can tick that job off the list.
Finally, we’ve made progress getting our planning application for the Elizabethan cottage ready to resubmit. The first one we put in has expired, and as we need to rebuild the lean-to we need to do a new application with listed building consent. We’re doing a proper rebuild of the lean-to (rather than a temporary fix) on the chance that at some point in the future we’ll actually get round to restoring that building. It’s not as easy as it sounds though – we’ve had to update various documents and get new surveys done. We started with the heritage statement (which seems ridiculous as literally nothing can change about the building’s heritage!) and the Assessment of Condition document which John amended to reference the collapsed lean-to. We also had our ecological survey to see what animals are present in that part of the building. There is no sign of bats – which is good – but there is strong evidence that birds will be nesting in the structure which means we can’t do any work until Autumn. That’s the worst time to build with lime mortar (a necessity given the listed condition of the building) so it’s quite likely we’ll need to take down the lean-to in Autumn, protect the cob walls over the winter, and then rebuild in the Spring, which is far from ideal from both a time and a cost perspective.
As part of the ecological survey, our ecologist also checked the new bat loft above the Games Room. I don’t think he found any bats, but he did find a huge pile of twigs kindly left by jackdaws – not content with taking over the Elizabethan cottage! Apparently we need to install some sort of baffle to put them off, or our guests could be having a quiet night in watching a movie, accompanied by noisy jackdaws!
Ley Farm Cottages 