The Cow Shed: A race against time

With The Cow Shed listing now live on Cottages.com (more on that later), we suddenly have a looming deadline to get the final works completed. Our builder Dave has put in an incredible effort this week and have finished almost all their remaining jobs – save for a few final fittings here and there. The kitchen has been finished – with appliances installed and the back panel put onto the cupboards, and a bit of touching up done. He’s put in slate thresholds at the two external doors in the Cow Shed – which then meant he could install the final skirting boards that sit next to the thresholds. At the same time he also replaced our pine one too as we were never really sure how to finish it. The slate looks so much better. He finished the week by emptying the various tools and tidying up and cleaning the house (in the heatwave no less, our hero), which has made it look so much bigger. Not long before we fill it up again with furniture… 

Our electricians have fitted the ensuite electric towel rail and all of our lights now. They’ve done such a good job and we’re so pleased with the lights we chose – they work well in the space. It might seem like we’ve overdone it slightly with the different lighting options – after all guests can choose from kitchen lights, living area lights, side lights and LED strips over the beams – but with all of them dimmable they offer a range of ambient light settings that should suit almost every guest! The outside lights have been put in as well – when we built the Shippon (our house) we bought enough outside lights for all the buildings so we could ensure a consistent look. One of the remaining jobs is to fit the switches and sockets – the ones we originally chose didn’t look in reality as they did in the pictures so we’ve asked our long-suffering electrician to find different ones. After having to redo the electrics for the living area lights last week he must be fed up with me now! 

I spent the weekend painting the woodwork in the Cow Shed – which I so very nearly finished! All the skirting board, the architraves, and the window ledge and shelf in the living area have been done – and the storage cupboard I’m hoping is done – it may just be a bit streaky and need touching up. I also started the first coat of the ensuite sink cupboard in the dying moments of Sunday – it does feel good though to have got so far through it all even if some still remain. 

It’s been a busy week with other building-related visitors. Openreach came to connect up the Cow Shed, and Building Control came to check everything over. Luckily we’ve passed! We also had someone from Awaze (the parent company of Cottages.com) come to take photos so we could get the listing up on the website and open our calendar from Monday 27^th July (hence the urgent rush as we have a number of unavoidable commitments over the next few weekends). This also meant John spent Thursday with our builder cleaning the place up and setting up the garden furniture in the heatwave! The listing went live early on Saturday morning with a number of inaccuracies so John has sent a few corrections over to our account manager. The photographer is coming back in a couple of weeks so we have a target date to get the Cow Shed mostly furnished and set up – it’s going to be a push but even if we can get most of the way there…