Fallen Apple Farm

Ever since day one of living on the farm, we’ve had a leak welling up from underneath the concrete in the tractor barn that’s been a perpetual nuisance and a mystery regarding its origin; Is there an underground spring? Did we somehow burst a pipe? Is our septic tank leaking??

Well that last one was disproven when a local came by and literally licked the water and he deemed it “clean enough” so 💁‍♂️

When the weather eventually turned from cold and sodden into warm(er) and dry(er), the plants really took root and the kids’ makeshift soccer pitch was in jeopardy of being just a bit too muddy so it was finally time to do something about it.

So I grabbed the SDS and the biggest chisel bit I could find and got to work gouging out fair size holes to see if I could track down the source. Armed with the knowledge our friendly Latvian neighbor imparted that it was probably a hose connection, I was confident we’d finally get this sorted…

The job was slow as the holes of course kept filling up with water and I had to hoover it out before I realized turning off our main water supply stopped the leak – duh! 🤦‍♂️

No luck but we’ll get there!

Finally have a room finished! It makes sense I guess that Owen’s room was the first one to be done. It’s tiny, so it was a quick way to feel some accomplishment. I say quick but here’s a reminder of how it started.. this photo was taken exactly a year ago..

Owen wanted a bright blue room with teal accessories and a fluffy rug. And it’s a pleasant, cheerful room to be in now. It gets a lot of sunshine!

It’s difficult to get a decent photo of it because the small size limits angles. It also doesn’t show how sunny it is – I took it in late afternoon with the sun no longer directly in there and I still had to lower the exposure so the brightness didn’t blow out! Suffice to say, it’s very nice and bright in there ??

Currently back to working on the red room and the plumber has started doing the bathroom (much excitement, I am very much looking forward to having a shower that doesn’t screech in your ear).

We have this lovely little open fireplace in the (no longer red) red room that we’re planning on fitting a small stove into but it needs a bit of demolition/masonry love before we can get woodstove Owen in (another Owen!)

So I spent a bit of time in March clearing out the debris and removing the side stones to expose the internal slate lintel and make sure the opening had enough clearance for the stove.

Just need to remove the metal rods (they’re kind of extra lintel support) and get K in to repoint the stonework and it’ll be good to go.

Update soon when the stove is fitted!

We have a couple of chimneys on the side of the house, one to a fireplace in the living room that needs to be opened up, and another to an old wood stove we took out of our dining area:

It’s obviously a wreck at the moment but we’ll get there! The red bag is catching water that’s been coming down the chimney and we’re going to knock a hole in the exterior wall and add a door with the future plan of adding a small conservatory on the outside of the house.

The dining room is small and so dark and dismal and we have no door out that side to the back field so we’re quite keen to brighten up the whole space. But first, the chimney had to come down! We found a company that would also install a warm roof over K’s room and the upstairs bathroom at the same time so we booked them in and they got to work… in extremely rainy and gusty conditions (see first pic) 😅

But they got there in the end… It was a bit of a harrowing and noisy couple of weeks and the day it was literally raining in K’s room because the lads didn’t know we didn’t have a ceiling up was.. not great. But it’s done now and we can crack on with other things.

Now we need to figure out how to put a door in the wall! #neverending

Some extra pics below of the job in progress.. not the best photos of the roof but hey, it’s a roof 💁‍♂️

We went to Center Parcs with Grandma and Grandpa mid April. Twas a nice break from the smell of dusty things and the daily dip in a hot tub has kept me going since. We came back with some souvenirs through the paint your own pottery studio.

The roofing company came throughout April to remove the entire chimney behind the dining room wall, fix the chimney top of the living room hearth and replace the roof above my room and the upstairs bathroom.

This was a fun day, I’m glad we were home for this. Tim asked if we needed to protect stuff in my room and the roofer said no – I think he assumed we have a ceiling, because the answer should have definitely been ‘yes’.

I came into the room just after they took the felt off and all the water that had collected on the roof started falling through the boards onto my bed! Luckily I came in just as it started and we had plastic sheeting and a large box nearby.

Also, it was raining so when the boards had been removed, it started raining all over my stuff. Mostly boxes of books so I now have a bunch of damp books. Well, damper.

These photos show the new roof, the removed chimney and the what-the-hell jumbled nonsense of bricks below the flue. Good thing we did this as the weather warms up because yes, that pipe is a hole going directly into the dining room. We have a plastic bag taped on the inside part to catch the rain. High tech stuff.

Also, the red room is no longer red because I’ve almost finished plastering, woop woop!

And another also, the last hibernating butterfly (that I know of) flew out of the house today ??

I really wanted to have photos of lovely, clean, neat exposed stone walls to share. I went to sleep last night thinking I only had the middle section of the last window to complete. Nearly done the hard parts! Let’s go!

I had a gap along the bottom of the wall, same as the other wall and I pulled the loose rocks away to find a large hole behind it.

There is an air brick there, which confirms my thoughts about it being for ventilation. But it’s painted over on the outside, which may explain how damp it is on this side. I could pull the floorboard up and see the effects.

This is where I lost heart a bit and went back to bed for a while. I started these walls before 18th March and felt like I was on the home stretch. Any extra work just felt like too much today.

I over eagerly bought a boiling water tap before our kitchen was even installed and it’s been sitting under the sink for nearly a year, just biding its time until we could fix up our water supply and ensure we wouldn’t damage the tank.

Well.. with our new well working… well 😏.. and our initial water tests coming back clean, I decided that the time has come to switch it on. We’re still pending a final hardness test so I’m sure K will have some misgivings but I say, enough is enough- let there be instant tea! 🫖😜

I over eagerly bought a boiling water tap before our kitchen was even installed and it’s been sitting under the sink for nearly a year, just biding its time until we could fix up our water supply and ensure we wouldn’t damage the tank.

Well.. with our new well working… well ?.. and our initial water tests coming back clean, I decided that the time has come to switch it on. We’re still pending a final hardness test so I’m sure K will have some misgivings but I say, enough is enough- let there be instant tea! ??

I wanted to plaster the back wall of the red room this week. Well, I was going to do the joists on the other side of the room but ugh no I don’t wanna. Holding heavy stuff slightly above my head for interminable lengths of time isn’t very appealing right now. Decided to wait until Tim can help.

So plastering it is! Much easier. I pulled the wallboard off around the window because it was cracked in places and I suspected the wall underneath would need repairing.

Tim liked the idea of having exposed stone. I wasn’t keen on it – I don’t have anything against the look but it would add a ton of work and I wasn’t confident I could make a neat job of it.

Seems there was a misunderstanding because I went for it thinking I was doing what Tim wanted, but turns out he’d decided I could just keep it covered. Oh well. Spent a few hours chiselling off a facade of mortar and then scraping out slightly damp dust from between the rocks. A few hours.. on one side of the window!

A bunch of the rocks came out of course. The next day I put the rocks back in with some lime mortar.

This was the day after that. Actually it wasn’t. It was raining hard that day and I was so grumpy in the morning at the thought of mixing mortar in that rain that Tim made an executive decision and put me on the sofa for a duvet day.

So the next day after that I scraped out the middle of the window. I was puzzled by the massive gap along the bottom (photo above). I can’t find any information online about why that might exist. Could it be for air flow? If it is I’ll be leaving a bit of a gap. But apparently the stuff on the front of the rocks was basically all that kept them up because when I scraped it off a bunch of the rocks along the bottom fell off along with the dust between them.

Research can only take me so far because there are questions I have that I can’t find answers to. Going by the fact that the house is still standing when obvious bodge jobs have been done all over it, I feel ok.

We planted half of the 6 bundles of hawthorn – 163 individual saplings planted today. All along the fence at the bottom of the field, leaving a few gaps for bigger trees like rowan and birch. We assumed we’d have some sent to us, but it was only hawthorn in the hedgerow bundles. They do say it’s more of a mix, I don’t know why we only got one type of plant. We’ll just buy some native trees to add to the future hedge.

We also planted 7 apple trees – a mix of dessert and crab apples. We weren’t so sure about where to plant those, so we shall see if they survive ?

We have a few apple trees left, the rest of the hawthorn and a ‘woodland’ bundle left to plant.