Gone are the days of being excited about an Amazon Delivery ... taking delivery this week of tons of timber, our rainwater harvesting tanks and sewage treatment system is altogether far more thrilling!
Some huge holes will be dug in the coming weeks to put these into the ground. The rainwater harvesting tanks should enable us to use water from the vast roof area for all our loo flushing, washing, animal watering, garden watering etc. Any overflow (it rains a lot in Somerset!) will be channelled via the drainage channels we've dug into our wildlife pond which will go where the slurry tank is (yes, it's still there!).
Building has actually begun for the plant room which will be the only new bit of building outside the walls of the barns. It's great to see some construction instead of destruction! This might sound like I'm planning to exercise my green fingers, but it's not for those sorts of plants. This is the 'ops room'...'Mission Control', where the ground source heat pump will come in from the field with all that lovely earthy heat to transfer into our home. Amazing technology, and once in place should mean we can heat the house in an environmentally sustainable way. The energy to run the pump will be powered by solar panels on the roof of the pig sty.
We are currently looking into whether we might get a wind turbine too. This thought came about after we were up on site this week and the wind was almost blowing us over! Work had to stop on removing metal panels from the barn, as the wind was threatening to whip them off, which would have been lethal. The panels being removed eventually enabled us to remove the old dairy's refrigeration unit ... another specialist disposal job, but another thing we're glad to see gone.
Another job this week has been to look at which timbers we are going to try to salvage for use within the barn as lintels or bressumers. Some are pretty rotten, but we are determined to save what we can and reuse. Andrew has a plan to use as many of the old roof timbers for building things like a hen house, work bench and I'm putting in my order for a 'hut and deck' by the pond. He's going to be busy!!
Finally, I had fun cutting up a shoe box as I needed to visualise a 3D image of how walls in the hall were going to connect with a complicated hip roof. It's a bit off scale, but I had fun and it did the job. The producer of Blue Peter will be calling me soon I'm sure (not!).
So things are going to pick up now I think. After a frustratingly quiet January and much of February, the last week or so have seen more action. Asbestos removal is the first big job starting next week (yet more specialist disposal...!), and this has to be supervised by the Ecologist to make sure there aren't any bats roosting or worse nesting, in the roof space.
We have a fixed date for the Ecologist to come back again to supervise the removal of the clay tiles of the vast expanse of roof which is 12th April. Before this lots has to be done, so it's all systems go! The plan is to get the floors dug out, drainage put in, floors levelled and concrete poured all before then.
In by Easter?!!
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