Waterloo Farm: a self-sufficient blog

Fantastic! The concrete dried and the Farm has changed in perspective again. Now there is a single floor throughout downstairs the place really seems to have opened up. Now we need to fit the Celotex (floor insulation), get the UFH laid onto it, and then finish the floor with 75mm of screed. It’s great to think that we will have a modern insulated floor with under floor heating, in a 200 year old farm house!

We also decided to bring forward putting in a couple of extra parking bays as we had some hard core going spare and Liam was still on site with the JCB and we could get rid of the earth with the earth excavated from in the house.

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Small break in the building works today when a good friend of Liam popped by to check out his new build house which is a stones throw away from the Farm. It turns out that his friend is famous actor Reece Ritchie, who happened to catch us on a short break from digging out earth and eating some much needed fish and chips!

Reece is a top guy and very down-to-earth and real. I guess that’s what you get from coming from good ‘ol Norfolk! (Though I should probably say Suffolk)

Reece has starred in the BBC’s Silent Witness and also The Bill for ITV.  He has also starred in the movies, as Moha in 10,000 BC, and The Lovely Bones and Triage. He has also just finished filming Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a film based on an old computer game, recognised by old gamers like me!

You can see the official trailer for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time below:

It was great to meet Reece, and I could not resist a taking a quick picture of him with Liam ‘pretending’ to help push a wheel barrow of hard core back into the Farm. Right…back to the wheel barrows!!

I managed to make it to The Farm briefly today to have a look at what’s been going on and also because I needed to help Nige make some decisions. When I arrived the ‘work force’ were sitting in front of an open fire in the snug eating fish and chips LOL, but I soon cracked the whip and got them back to work! The house is looking extremely scary now! It’s amazing how quickly you forget what it looked like before though - it’s as though the walls have never been there. The biggest change, which was not on the original plans, is that we are now going to have a full galleried landing upstairs which I’m actually really pleased about! We had intended to leave some of the wall in place but actually it was bowing so badly we felt it was safer to just knock it down, so now it’s gone! I ventured up the ladder to the upstairs and the ensuite wall has also been ‘chopped’ to form the new landing so there’s now just a huge space where walls used to be! I believe that the wall in the entrance hall may have been coming down this afternoon as the steel was being delivered, and that’s the last major bit of wall to come down! Dale and Mark have warned us that taking down is very fast and that progress will slow considerably after this initial phase, but even so, I’m very impressed with the progress after only 3 days. There is an awful lot of clearing up to do though …

AND NO I am not talking about Christmas! Finally building works start on The Farm tomorrow yay!! I have got two weeks off to be a barrow pusher and hod carrier (whatever a hod is ;)).

I shall try to keep you up-to-date on progress, but I have a feeling all the strenuous lifting and shifting may require some early nights. Also the builders start at 7.30am!!

Until tomorrow…