Fallen Apple Farm

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 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.

I spent the morning scraping out the crumbly mortar in the rocks between the joist ends in the red room. Rocks came out with it, and I was feeling a bit more grim with each one (it’s ok this is only a load bearing wall that I’m taking literal boulders out of).

A couple of the joist ends look a bit worse than I originally thought. Look at this one not supporting anything at all, just being held up by nails in the floorboards above!

Don’t worry, the dark patch is an antifungal thing painted on. Probably pointless, but won’t do any harm at least.

Took a long time to chisel out enough rock in a couple of places so we could slide in the joist plates. Bolting them to the joists wasn’t easy either – Tim smacked himself fully in the face when a socket wrench slipped off a bolt. He’s thinking he may have broken his nose.. it is looking a bit wonky now ?

But we managed to get two plates on this afternoon. It doesn’t seem like a lot but chiselling rock in such small gaps is a bit tricky.

The joists between those also need doing but they need a bunch more chiselling under them that I just couldn’t face or had time for. My shoulders aren’t thanking me this evening. Still, we made progress ?

The electrician is making progress! We have a fancy new fuse box that doesn’t crackle, Tim’s and the boys’ wall sockets are done and the red room is done. He will be doing the infrared panels in those rooms next time. For now, we can actually start painting walls and other nice things that aren’t dusty. Well.. I’ll tape and fill the joins between the wallboards and put skirting board down and architrave round the doors first which yes, I know will take a few weeks but my brain is only saying “I can paint now?!”

On another note while we are in the red room which won’t always be red but the name might stick for some time: after pulling the ceiling down I noticed the ends of the joists don’t look too great.

After a bit of anxious research, it doesn’t appear to be too bad. I bought some joist splice plates to give them some more support, Tim will help me put those in this week.

Taking the ceiling down was its own special type of pain in the arse. The space between the joists was full of grain husks, concrete dust and dead spiders. For insulation I guess? Taking a board down meant being showered with the detritus mentioned above and it was awful.

That picture really doesn’t show the depth of misery that fell down my shirt and into my hair. But it’s done now and I’ll never have to do it again!

If you guessed somewhere between 20-50 then congratulations, you are not even close. Not even a little. We knew we had saplings being delivered, and not really any idea of what to expect and how they’d be delivered, but..

We didn’t expect them to be literal twigs! All those twigs in there are individual cuttings to be planted. When Trees on the Land reviewed our land etc, we figured they knew what they were doing when they said they’d send us 450 trees for free. We raised an eyebrow at the time, but now it makes sense!

Side note to praise the non-profit Trees on the Land! Here’s a snippet from their site https://www.treesontheland.com/

Trees on the Land is a cross-border initiative working to establish young native trees across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Our vision is to establish tree cover and woodland in rural and urban areas that will grow for many years and provide valuable resources, beneficial ecosystem services and a lasting legacy for future generations.

We plant small woodlands, orchards, hedgerows, shelter belts, coppice, wood-pasture, agroforestry, individual trees, rows and avenues of trees, landscape and amenity trees, reforestation sites and larger woodlands. We have planted more than a million trees at several thousand sites since 2013.

Love it. The timing is a bit shite though. I really wanted to finish some more stuff in the house before we do anything with the land but hey ho, the earlier these are poked into the ground (I’m sorry, “planted”) then the earlier we’ll have hedges and stuff.