Barn Progress

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The courtyard was becoming a quagmire with the digger, dumper and concrete lorries coming and going so a layer of stone has been laid. This instantly brightened the place up and made it look tidy. A bit like when you mow the lawn and the garden looks marvellous. I think all the foundations for plot 1 have been set and are ready for brick laying to the sub floor level so that the concrete floor can be set. In the meantime there is a mountain of bricks to clean so that they can be re-used. This is a bit of a tedious job which I'm secretly pleased that I can't help with due to the daily 9-5! I do miss pretty much everything else so I get a daily report with photo's and videos to keep me up to date. Below is a video landmark moment in the life of barn 2.

 

 

More bricks (less barn)

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More progress with barn 1 means a bigger pile of bricks as the unstable walls fall down. The remaining section of barn (which then turns into barn 2) is largely supported by some breeze block towers on the courtyard side where the walls are very bowed. In the photo above you can see the green area on the wall which is a very inappropriate yet interesting wall garden of ferns and violets.

Footings for new walls

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A progress report. At last a progress report. Over the last couple of weeks a lot has happened. Barn 1 has planning permission for new walls courtyard side to make the barn bigger. Now we have visual evidence of this because the courtyard and interior walls are down and the floors and the footings dug out. Some of the footings have been filled with concrete, with the next load to be delivered on Monday. Hip Hip Hoorah! Somewhat alarmingly the front wall of barn 1 was supposed to be left standing but when the floors were dug out the wall gently toppled away and leaned against the scaffolding. Fortunately the planning officer has inspected and allowed the wall to be demolished and rebuilt with the same bricks. This certainly makes it an easier job for our structural engineer and builder. The one remaining wall for this barn has to stay as it forms the back of next doors garage and I don't think a decision has been made on how to deal with the footings at the base of this wall yet.

It almost seems like an aside to the flurry of activity on barn 1, but the remaining roof tiles on the other barns have also been removed so it's all open air barning now. Our 'barns for conversion' are turning into piles of brick and rubble. We are trying not to worry!

Digging out a tree root

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Dan the digger was tasked with moving the big pile of soil from the road clearing deposited next to the buildings. The ideal place for it all was to infill the big dip at the front of the barns where the additional car park area will be. The first task was to dig out the sycamore tree root. Now this would have been a herculean task to do it by hand so we were immensely relieved to have Dan on the case. Since I was at work Mr Barn videoed it for me. I do love a vid of a digger.......and if you look carefully you will see Dan's dog sitting in the cab.

Just to remind you how humungous the sycamore tree was, here is a time lapse video of the tree being taken down last year. If you think that it was a shame to take the tree down, we know that it was 40 years old because our neighbours remembered planting it........a sycamore can continue growing for 200+ years!

Digging and demolition

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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.

Trial pits

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At last there has been digger activity at the barns. Our builder has caught up with his other projects and is now going to be concentrating on ours. That said, he is not coming back until Monday...........probably. But at least there has been some work done today, and trial pits were the first job on the list. These are needed for the structural engineer to work out how the barns are currently constructed so that he can decide how our converted barns are to be repaired and made structurally sound. I was half expecting to see a heap of rubble and collapsed barn but all was intact except for the mains water pipe for the neighbour which has now been located, broken and repaired - and wasn't in the position marked on his deeds. The pictures below show the extent of the existing foundations, or more like the lack of foundations.