Barn update

Blogging has slipped by the wayside of late, although Instagram has filled a bit of an update gap as it is easy to take a photo and upload with just a couple of sentences, but now it’s time to post a more detailed update – anyway as I type it’s raining outside and I am on holiday.

So where are we up to?

Barnarama from 6th August

Barnarama from 6th August

Barn 1 is largely unchanged as our contractor made the decision to wait until barn 2 reached roof level so that the roof could be done on both at the same time. This seemed an eminently sensible thing to do so we agreed without quibbling. However, it seems to have taken ages for barn 2 to get to rafter height. Every time rain stops play or our rather small building team are taken off to do a job somewhere else we have been kicking ourselves for not insisting on barn 1 being pushed to completion.

Barn 2 has now reached roof height – hooray. The beam is in and the rafters, boarding out and insulation is being installed as I type. The final bit of brickwork where the roof level changes is also being finished. It has been slow……..very slow, but it looks absolutely fantastic! The layout is as envisioned, well actually it looks bigger than I imagined, which is clearly good news. And the upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms are much bigger than I thought they would be. It’s really hard to imagine it all when it’s just on a piece of paper. To be honest, we have largely been hoping that the room upstairs rooms were going to be nicely proportioned because we didn’t see the cross section plans and therefore the height of the roof until the ground floor was finished. We know that our architect (and builder) are very busy, but we seem to get the plans in a ‘not quite in time’ basis. There seems to be quite a bit of judgement going into this build - thank heavens the brick layer is experienced (our hero), but it passes inspection at every stage and looks great so we are not complaining. We do need a bit of retrospective window altering to take place in the living room of barn 2 as they are set really high which is faithful to the original building, so I want at least 3 courses of bricks to be cut out of the base of each window. I don’t mind them being a little bit high so that they don’t impede on the layout of the furniture as it is quite a small lounge, but I think you need to be able to see out of them! Fortunately, there is a window on the front elevation in that room which is quite low so there will be a view out of this room.

Barn 3 is on the move. Well, not literally but the brick pile (which is still pretty huge) is being moved to the front of the barns so that the foundations can be dug. Whoop Whoop! A lot of bricks have been cleaned. Not by an army of brick cleaners, but mostly by Richard who is losing the will to bash another brick. And there are still so many of the flipping things. So where is the army of brick cleaners? We were promised a youngster who was going to earn some holiday money but he didn’t appear. The trouble is that it is too time consuming, dirty and elbow rattling to tempt any helpers, and we guess that our builder is looking at his budget before taking on anyone just yet and Richard is free! To be honest, we are leaving him to manage his budget and doing our best to chip in and help as any excessive cost on his budget will be passed to us and we want (need) our original quote to stand without getting any bigger.

Barn Conversion - Building site!

At last we have a building site where actual building is taking place. A flurry of activity at the beginning of the week with deliveries of blocks, sand and cement, has culminated in the first few blocks being laid. It was interesting to see how the building lines were determined with laser sites and string, but they looked as if they knew what they were doing :)

Meanwhile, the pallets of cleaned bricks are growing and the (first) pile of demolished bricks has diminished. All in all, it is great to see something happening!

Whilst the skilled work is done by the builders (see the blocks for the sub floor in the background?), we have been very fortunate to have family and friends who have volunteered to help clean bricks. Here we have Rob and Val mucking in on a very cold January day. It looks sunny on the photo but they have also had fog, cloud and rain. It's not a lot of fun cleaning bricks, but is much more bearable with company.

Digging and demolition

Work on the lane is underway and close to being finished. It has seemed very slow progress but there has been a lot more to it than I imagined - so, no surprises there then! The lane is about 300m long and it has a gentle climb to to the top of the hill. The method of attack has been to dig a channel at least 2 feet deep a pipe length at a time with the sewer piper laid in it in a bed of gravel, along with a conduit pipe for Open Reach broadband cable. Along the first section of the lane were some extra hazards including power cables, an unmarked sewer and water mains pipe. At every (slight) bend in the road a man hole has been installed as well as a silt trap. Hopefully when its all finished the road won't wash away and flood at the bottom the next time it rains. About half way up a 20m section of sandstone was encountered so that slowed progress as it had to hammered out by a different digger. A couple of days ago the pipe reached the top of the lane - whoo hoo! Since then, the lane surface and passing places have been scraped ready for the top layer of stone (approx 80 tons) to be laid and rolled flat. It will be like a proper lane rather than a dangerous and muddy track (hopefully). 

Dan the digger (and dog) and Frank have now been joined by a couple of lads taking down the roof on plot 1, carefully removing the dangerous walls and cleaning up the bricks ready to re-use. How exciting.........some actual work on the barns. After waiting so long for something to start happening, it really is underway at last.

My role at the moment is chief watcher and photographer.........No doubt soon enough I'll be joining in with brick cleaning and undergrowth hacking and chopping, but for the moment I'm content with hobbling around and watching.