Burn baby burn

Still waiting for planning permission but in the meantime we are still clearing the way for building. It's been a two pronged attack with the ivy covered outbuildings having a 'haircut' and some of the self seeded trees removed from the front of the buildings. This made for a few days of back breaking work, mostly completed by others :), but I joined in with the burning part, allowing my inner pyromaniac to come out for a bit. You can see the progress below of the ivy removal

And now for the bonfire....

Summer residents are packing up to go

The barns have been a veritable nursery for birds this summer as they probably have been for all time. We had an ecological check earlier this year for bats and owls and fortunately the barns are far too draughty for bats! However, this will be the last summer that any birds will be nesting indoors  (hopefully!) so I thought I would try and photo some of the feathered activity. Our neighbours had said that swallows came every year and I was really fortunate with timing for one nest of swallows. The first nest fledged before I even found it as it is very unnerving to be inside a smallish room with swallows diving in at high speed, but the second one was in a different building and could be seen from the doorway. I set up the camera on a tripod with a remote shutter release (a birthday treat) and sat in the courtyard and waited. As soon as a parent bird flew into the barn I started snapping away and well, see the results.....

Waiting for planning

After a flurry of activity the plans have been finalised and submitted for planning approval. It was actually more of a panicky rush because we really wanted to do this before we went on holiday and so at 16:45 on the day before our holiday I was at the local town hall paying the fee ready for our architect to assemble all the required documents to submit online. It's just as well we did because the decision date is 3rd September but the planning department have been deluged with planning requests and asked for a 3 week delay. You can't really object because you don't want to antagonise your case officer! We really thought that as long as the building changes were accepted the rest would be a formality since it already has planning approval (renewed twice), but we have already have some objections from local residents about the access lane and the coal board have said that we need a mining survey. Talk about nerve racking. Jon (our architect) has assured us that we shouldn't panic and he will investigate the coal board request and talk to the structural engineer. 

On site whilst there is no progress with the buildings, a lot of ground clearing has been done. The garden is looking quite open now and there is plenty of room for the builders to manoeveur. A couple of bonfire days has seen off most of the debris from the canopy demolition and the jungly garden. 

Also, the connection to the Severn Trent drains has been completed at the bottom end of the lane. This is now ready for the water runoff from the lane to be connected in and so hopefully prevent flooding at the bottom, which is a regular problem for the residents at the moment after a heavy downpour. It will also be the connection for our sewers as we really wanted to avoid having to build a water treatment plant.

A monster chipper

We  hired this monster chipping machine to clear the big pile of cuttings from felling the trees. It certainly did the business in short order. We booked it for a day, but due to a mixup was only able to collect it at 1pm instead of 7:30am. We thought this would ruin our chances of getting the job finished in a day, but with a couple of helpers we managed to clear 2 enormous piles of cuttings in an afternoon. It was certainly a voraciously hungry machine, and we were relieved that we hadn't booked if on the same day as cutting down the trees as we would never have managed to keep it fully occupied.  There's a nice big pile of mulch to keep the weeds down now! We plan to hire it again in the autumn when we can thin out some more bushes and trees when we can be sure there are no birds nesting. We wanted to attack a thicket of holly, but it is absolutely full of birdsong, so chances are it is full of nests!

Tree fellers

A difficult decision, but we have taken down a couple of trees close to the barns. One was a sycamore that was only 40 years old but was absolutely huge. They can live over 200 years and are attracted to water sources such as drains. Not a good place to have a sycamore when it will be within 10 metres of a  new sewer system. The other was a flowering cherry, which had already been subjected to extreme hacking to allow the farm vehicles access to the fields.  A couple of days of back breaking work and the worst of it is done. We attracted a lot of attention from the local dog walkers, most of whom were sensitive to the problems we would face if the trees remained. We've had problems before with drains collapsed by parkland trees in a suburban setting so were anxious to try prevention rather than cure. We will plant some more trees in time, but not whoppers and not next to the barns.

It's all going to  be far too much for a bonfire and it made sense to salvage wood for the log burners. It will all be nicely seasoned by the time we are ready to burn it in a log burner. However, there is the problem of how to get rid of the smaller branches as well as the conifers recently knocked down during the canopy demolition, so have decided to hire a monster wood chipper. We are planning to use the chippings as a mulch to keep down weeds in the garden and anywhere else that will be newly exposed to the sunlight,  so that deals with the chip mountain problem. In our last house we had two gi-normous maple trees taken down and I rather foolishly suggested that we keep all the chips to compost them. There was an enormous pile, which we then had to move into a specially made holding pen. As the trees were in full leaf, the chippings started to compost almost immediately so when we moved them it was a steaming pile of chippings and almost too warm to grab in armfuls. It then took about 2 years for all the chips to compost down to use on the garden. I'm keen to avoid this problem this time around!

Ground clearing

Physical progress at last. The canopy attached to plot 3 has been getting more and more dilapidated. The snow at Christmas really tested it's strength and it failed the test. A bit of the covering fell off and the supports really took a hammering. Subsequent high winds over the last few months have all taken their toll and then the week before last it took a further turn for the worse  in the strong wind. Emergency action required, so we arranged for Carl the builder to take a look and he agreed that it needed dealing with sooner rather than later.

Before....

After....

The brooding beast

Demolition day arrived and unfortunately I was at work so missed all the excitement because a humungous digger thing arrived to knock it all down. That is the canopy, not the barn:)  For some inexplicable reason, I have a  deep fascination with mechanical things, especially big diggers. 'Easily entertained'  could be my motto. The big digger can only travel at 12 miles an hour so it took a while to get there, but when it did, it really made short order of removing the canopy. It just extended it's long arm with the prongs at the end and lifted up the canopy, which promptly broke in various rotten places and was laid to rest on the floor. It was then just a clear up job picking up the corrugated sheets and putting them in the skip and moving the wood to one side for burning later. And then, joy of joys, it knocked down all the conifers, roots and all,  so we won't have any laborious root digging to do. Hoorah! A big bonfire is on the horizon now, and this should be much easier to do because there is much more space to do it in.

VAT

We've been trying to get our heads around the VAT situation regarding our conversion. Having read through HMRC's 'VAT Notice 708:building and construction' document a few times (!), I felt reasonably confident that we could work out how the VAT would work for our own house. However, the VAT treatment for the property that we are going to sell and the one we intend to rent just wasn't clear, so we thought we had better seek professional advice. This proved to be a really good move as it highlighted the different VAT/income tax/capital gains tax pitfalls that we might fall into if we don't record everything properly from the beginning. A summary of the meeting is below, although this is what we thought that he said and may not be absolutely correct! 

·         As we are converting barns to create three properties we need to separate out all costs per property. This includes all VATable and non VATable invoices.

o   DIY house
o   House to sell
o   House to rent

·         The building contractor will charge 5% VAT for conversion regardless of whether we are going to live in one, sell one or rent one.

·         If we buy anything for our own house and we are charged standard rate VAT (20%), we can claim back 15% when the building is signed off.

·         We need to be VAT registered (as a partnership) for the house we are going to sell and then we can claim back ALL VAT at 3 monthly intervals. We have to state to HMRC which building we are going to sell.  This is because when we sell the house it is considered to be a new house which is zero rated VAT. If we sell the property part converted, it will be zero rated up to that point, but any costs subsequently incurred by the new owner will be subject to at least 5% VAT.

·         When we sell the property we can offset the costs of developing the property against the sale price for income tax or capital gains tax purposes

·         For our rental property we can’t claim back any VAT for invoices that have been charged at standard rate VAT. The building contractor will charge 5% VAT for the conversion – we don’t need to pay any more if this is the VAT charged. If we decide to sell the property in the future, it would then become subject to zero rate VAT for the sale but we can’t claim back any VAT paid out at the time of development eg 5% charged by building contractor or any invoices charged at standard rate. The development costs will be offset against the sale price for capital gains tax or income tax purposes.

·         If rented property is successfully let as a holiday rental (available for 210 days, let for 105 or more) then capital gains tax is 10% when sold, as opposed to 28% (higher rate tax) or 18% (lower rate tax) for normal rented property.