Our outbuilding is an old stable with tack room and as such has some very old stable doors on it; well, mostly falling off it to be more accurate! Anyway, I ‘commissioned’ my dad (Rick) to make us some new ones, but only out of old wood, whatever he could find around the place that had been left over from all the renovation work. (more…)
A major milestone arrived today when we took delivery of the oak stair case and galleried landing. Scary thing was it was in 77 different pieces!!
We now have the unenviable task of getting it all sealed before it gets fitted at the end of the week … I sense a lot of late nights coming up.
Well all of that might seem a mouthful, but it what it means is that our hot water will be ‘blasted’ out of the taps without the need for a pump! Mains pressure means the hot water comes out of the pipes at the same pressure as the cold water. Unvented means there is no cold water header tanks in the loft waiting to fill up with all sorts of nasties from your loft.
We went for a Range Tribune HE 210litre cylinder and it really looks the business!!! 
Always important for us that quality of design and feature is also matched by it looking good!
Having been persuaded by our previous builders that we needed to order the steels right at the start of the project in December (then had to pay for them to be painted to stop them from rusting!), they are finally in place and looking great! There are 2 which sit at right angles to one another and kind of get webbed together. The first is internal and holds up the ceiling where there was once a dividing wall. The second is a replacement lintel below which will eventually be a four metre opening for a folding-sliding window/door affair. In order to put this one in the whole of the back of the house needed to be propped up so it didn’t collapse into the hole – quite scary to see one’s house held up by scaffolding with a huge hole underneath, but our builders Trevor and Bob (our very own Bob the Builder 
) have done a fantastic job with it and we can now get the sense of how wide the big windows/doors will be.
Another month and the destruction starts again! This is really the final big push, and one of the key changes to The Farm.
You might notice that the window on the right has been removed, and the old patio doors are starting to be removed. The plan is that ultimately there will be a new folding sliding door arrangement across almost the whole of the back wall, which will really open up the new kitchen/family room.
It is slightly scarey though as the whole of the front of the house rests on lintels above these windows, so careful propping will be required to allow the new steel lintel to go in.
