Barn Progress

Another few weeks have gone by and not a great deal has changed, not big things anyway. The little things have all been about tidying up and finishing off and just getting on with life. No doubt we will have some action in barn 2 soon, but for the moment we are pottering along. The main changes inside are that we have a carpet and bedroom furniture in the master bedroom……..just need to make a blind and fit a shelf and rail in the fitted wardrobe and we can move in. Our rather quirky furniture is from a local firm ‘Ebiniste’ who are so busy with word of mouth business and ebay that they don’t need to advertise!

When we move into the master bedroom the downstairs bedrooms can be decorated. It never seems to end! The coat cupboard is almost finished, but at least we have coats hanging up now instead of just hanging around.

When the weather turned cold we realised that the small loft space above the utility room and downstairs wet room hadn’t been insulated - this became apparent when the MVHR unit, which is housed in the loft, stopped working until it warmed up a bit. Richard now spends a few hours here and there fitting celotex between the joists. It’s a messy job in a tight space so he will be glad when it’s finished. The loft can then be finished off and used for a bit of storage. More tidying up, hooray!

During the summer we switched off the boiler as it was only running to heat our hot water since the other barns are not in use. Instead, we were able to fill the hot water tank from the solar iboost unit which heats the hot water when there is spare electricity and is also an immersion heater. That all went well and when the weather became a bit autumnal we switched the boiler back on for the underfloor heating. Again, it all went well and we were full of relieved smugness. At least, that is until the solar iboost stopped working and then the new supply of pellets upset the temporary auger (feeding the boiler from hopper) and the boiler stopped working, both at the same time. The result……no hot water at all. Such a pain. Fortunately we can get the boiler going again but until it’s all fixed it means tripping backwards and forwards to the garage to check it all. Oh, and that’s another little irritation - we haven’t yet been able to connect the boiler to the internet due to various problems with hardware and software so we can’t watch the boiler from the sofa! Again, that will get fixed but in the mean time it has whiled away a huge amount of time to get nowhere fast.

Boiler update - the engineer has been out and the auger has been lowered slightly and the hopper moved away a bit to see if a different angle will help. The boiler is running happily for the moment but may need a shorter auger as the new pellets are not holding together as well as the last lot and the long auger seems to be breaking them down too much……sigh

Electricity update

It's getting very close for a final go ahead for electricity.  We thought we had passed the finish post after all the documents were signed and we had paid a kings ransom for the privilege and had a date from Western Power for installation in September. However, after instructing our builder to start the groundwork it has now transpired that we haven't had the final go ahead and there a more bills to pay. Funnily enough, starting the work seems to have prompted some action. Talk about a tortuous (and expensive) process. It has been a traumatic time with a 3 way solicitor exchange and deeds discussed and signed by board of trustees at their quarterly board meetings. It has been beyond a joke, but we are looking forward now to completing barn 1. We may actually move in this year!!!!!!

Building drawing plans review and more bricks

Repaired wall

Gap in the neighbours wall bricked up

Damaged wall

Fields in summer

More pallets of cleaned bricks!

On the brick and wall front, it's pretty much the same as last time except that the brick pile is noticeably smaller, the brick pallets are bigger and there is a bit more wall. The rest of the joists and the floor boarding have been delivered and we have been assured by our builder that more chaps will be on site on Monday to fit them in place. Meanwhile, next doors walls have been repaired and so the neighbours are happy. The flipping joist delivery man managed to take out a chunk of one of our walls though, so that will need to be fixed at some point! 

It's a long time since we reviewed our plans for barn 3. In fact it was 2 years ago! So now the rebuild of barn 3 is (sort of) imminent, we have been going over our previous plans with the architect. It's been such a long time since we started all of this barn converting lark that if it had gone ahead and been finished by now we wouldn't have changed anything. However.......two years down the line and we have made a few changes. Nothing drastic - the layout is pretty similar, but now we know for certain that it is more of a rebuild than a conversion we realised that we could make a few tweaks to the sizes of the rooms and the position of some of the windows. To summarise; the garage is a little bit bigger and the hallway a little bit smaller, the downstairs loo a bit bigger and the pantry a bit smaller. We were really unsure originally how the layout of the lounge was going to work with the position of the windows so we have moved one! It's a door shaped window looking out onto the back garden and it was originally placed in the corner of the room as per the layout of the barn, which is an absolutely useless place for sitting and looking out onto the garden. So we have moved it to the middle of the wall rather than at the end which means that the tv will be able to go into the corner and all the seating areas will have a view out of the window. Phew! An interior design conundrum solved. We are also decided that we are going to have a faux chimney breast so that we can have an inset log burner and wood store. The window move has also means that we can keep the double doors into the lounge from the hall, which is a feature we really wanted to keep but just couldn't work out how the furniture was going to fit. 

Joists and bull nosed bricks and a snake

We are waiting for some of the joists to be delivered for barn 2 but the rest have been put into position along with the 'steels' or rsj's. We have joists with 'holes' so that our heating pipes and MVHR ducting can easily fit through the floor.

I dropped in at the barns on my way home from work and found myself scrambling around on scaffolding almost entirely inappropriately dressed except that I managed to change my sandals for a pair of scruffy trainers. It was such a lovely evening that it was worth it to get some lovely photo's in the evening sun.

Bull nosed bricks have not yet featured in our barn building, but since the majority of them have come out of the big barn, they will all go back into barn 3.

And finally, we had an unexpected moment with a snake at the weekend. Yes, I did say 'snake'. Fortunately it was a grass snake and not an adder which decided that it wanted to snooze in the engine of visiting friends car!

Check and re-check the plans against the building!

Barn 1 master bedroom and en-suite

The building is progressing for barn 2 but not without the odd hiccup. Due to a misunderstanding with the versions of the plans some of the joists were ordered incorrectly. This meant that more had to be ordered causing a week's delay to the first floor boarding out and consequently the continuation of the block and brick laying on the first floor. It's such a shame because the weather has been so good for building. We took the opportunity in the lull in building activity to have a good scout around in barn 1 by manoeuvring a ladder into place so that we could get into the first floor bedroom. We haven't been up there since before the rafters and boarding were fitted and barn 1 only has one first floor bedroom and en-suite, so is a small part of the building as a whole. We then discovered that one of the roof windows was in the wrong place. Again a later change to the plans hadn't been included so when the staircase was changed to bend around at the top of the stairs rather than just go straight up, it meant that the bathroom became a bit larger. Now the bathroom has an extra roof window and the stairs none! Fortunately, this is not a disaster because neither the roof or the windows have been fitted. Phew......we are so glad we checked now rather than later.

The window lintels are looking great in plot 2 with a mixture of brick arches and original stone lintels.

More brick cleaning and barn building

Bringing order to chaos, the pallets of cleaned bricks are getting bigger and the brick mountain is gradually getting smaller. 

The good news is that barn 2 is gradually growing but the not so good news is that there has been no further progress with barn 1. The plan is that the roof will be done on both 1 and 2 at the same time. The rain last week didn't help as the builders don't play in the rain. Today, however, the team have been at work in the beautiful July weather. Most notable today is that the cambered heads have been made and fitted ready for the brick arches over the windows. I'm looking forward to seeing these as the mixture of original stone lintels and brick arches really make it look interesting and of course are true to the original barns.

and the barn came tumbling down

Just when you think that progress is slowing down and you are wondering if it will ever be finished, something dramatic happens. Nope, we haven't finished one and moved in, now that would be ridiculously dramatic........instead we have more destruction than construction as the last barn has been demolished. At first it was really exciting to hear that it had come down, and the videos of the JCB pushing and prodding the building really encouraged a Hooray feeling. But when I went to the site in the evening after work, it just looked like a bomb site. It was really quite shocking that instead of a charmingly delapidated building there was an enormous pile of rubble and rafters. It was a very sobering, 'OMG what have we done' sort of visit. You tell yourself that the new building will be made with the same bricks and to the same layout (but just not irrevocably falling down) as before, but it still made me feel sad that we couldn't renovate rather than rebuild. There really is no going back once the building is down. I'm sure I will feel different about it once they start building it back again. To cheer myself up I had a look around barn 2 which is now up to first floor height with the internal walls currently being built, and I have to say it is coming on fantastically well. So not all doom and gloom. 

The following day I popped over in my lunch break and it already looked much better as the site was being tidied up. Mind you, there is now the most enormous pile of bricks to clean. We went over yesterday to clean bricks and managed a good 250 or so, but that barely made a dent in the pile. There are thousands of them.

From charming delapidated building in 2016.....

.....to bomb site in 2017.....

.......to semblance of order.

To find a 'before' photo I went back through each month until I came to a particularly photogenic month last June. That was when we were desperately wishing that some building would start, although still wrangling with the coal mining surveys and structural surveys so not in the slightest worry free. As a reminder here are a few of those lovely picturesque barn photo's.