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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Mark and Dale have been busy today (this does not imply they are not busy on other days!) with some really noticable results. Firstly the cut through into the master bedroom to create the new corridor, needed to resolve the en suite bedroom issue and allow us to put our bed central to the window allowing us to wake up and survey ‘our land’ !

Also, the old stud partition wall between bedroom 3 and 4 is now cleared so the new studs can be put up allowing the old ones to be removed. It’s really exciting when ‘big’ things happen like this as one has a real sense of progress.

Exciting day today as we saw the cut through of the new door way into the Family Room.

It was a very messy business in terms of dust, at one stage it looked like the house was on fire with the dust bellowing out of the open doors and windows. Mark and Dale appeared like snowmen, Mark actually took on a rather festive Father Christmas type appearance!

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I think Mark and Dale were getting wall removal withdrawl symptoms, so we agreed to take some more down! (Hey what is another few walls amongst friends?!)

The walls in question ‘made up’ the downstairs cloakroom, however, they sat on top of the concrete pad that we need to remove, so it made the most sense to take them down.

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It felt like things slowed down today, but no one worked any less hard. I guess it is true what they say, it is harder to build things up than knock them down!

The steel lintel that was on the floor yesterday which was required to knock through from the entrance hall to the old pantry, is now in place, thanks to the swirling efforts of Dale and Mark. Dale appeared to be acting as a human ‘acrow’ at one stage! It now sits snugly into the wall and is actually level with the ceiling, which means we can place a thin oak beam to cover it and it looks like we will have an oak beam.

With all the remaining wall out and the room cleared it really starts to open out the entrance hall area.

I was handy with my barrow as ever and kept the teas and coffees coming.

I wonder what day 5 will bring?