What a difference a fortnight can make!

Last Wednesday morning, less than three weeks ago, the cottage consisted of completed foundations, a block and beam floor, and a single course of block-work marking out the internal and external walls.

This was a little frustrating, as we had been anticipating that the wall panels would arrive on site and start to be assembled on Tuesday.

The walls in question had in fact appeared, as scheduled, on the back of a lorry on Tuesday morning. But despite the hauliers promising that their lorry would definitely fit through our narrow entrance and over the cattle grid… Well, it didn’t – and wasn’t going to, at least not without us demolishing our neighbour’s fence. Late in the afternoon one of our friendly local farmers kindly came to save us with a tractor and a bale handler, and at least the panels were finally safely…

After discussions with Mark, our architect, and Ellie, our project manager from the timber frame company, we decided on an approach which would both minimise the number of heavy vehicles which needed access to the site, and which reduced the amount of concrete being poured or otherwise assembled into the ground to an absolute minimum. These priorities came from pragmatism (our access is a bit narrow, and shared with our neighbours – it was important to minimise damage to the drive and above all nuisance to our neighbours) and also out of our desire wherever possible to make environmentally responsible choices.

We hoped to minimise excavations; thankfully the building regulations inspector came and peered into our relatively shallow foundation trenches and was content with what he found there – a subsoil commonly found locally known as ‘shillet’, made up of broken up soft slate and shale. This meant we could get on…

The old barn, sadly, was a hopeless case, timbers rotten through and barely held together by the equally rusted corrugated panels. It’s been some time since we’ve been happy to step inside it for any length of time, and I’m quite surprised that last winter’s storms didn’t do for it completely – they did however leave some quite impressive gaping holes, and, what with the increasingly obvious double-pitch roof ‘feature’, it was clear that the structure was becoming increasingly unsafe and something had to be done to deal with it.

On one of the warmest days of the year, at the end of June, some good friends came to give us a hand to take the barn down. In the end, the old building put up surprisingly little resistance, the rotten timbers came away more or less painlessly at ground level after we removed the corrugated metal, eventually leaving just…

In June of 2014, a little over a year ago, we arrived in our new home in North Cornwall, just outside the lovely moorland village of Altarnun. The move to this beautiful part of the world is something that we had spoken about doing for many years, though in truth we rather suspected it might need to wait for our retirement! But life had other ideas, and when some kind Whitehall bureaucrat decided that they needed a high speed rail line to Birmingham, and that this line – the HS2 high speed railway – would be going straight through the garden of our pretty Northamptonshire cottage, it was time to take things into our own hands, and take the plunge.

We were incredibly lucky to find a home on the very edge of Bodmin Moor, one of Cornwall’s wild beauty spots and an AONB, tucked away but within easy reach of the…