What does Doug do during the week?

All the animals of course, which is plenty of work with pigs, chickens, quail and rabbits needing food every day (some of them twice a day). The horses needing feeding suppliment every day and their feet doing with derm paste every other day. The cow gets milked every other day at the moment and the sheep need feeding a little bit to keep them tame as well as to make sure they get enough salt. Rabbits quail and chickens need cleaning out from time to time and sheep, cows and horses need moving from field to field - which usually involves some sort of fencing

Then there is maintaining the drive and paths. This involves a lot of mowing and general taming of growing things that are tring to take over. As well as digging out the ditch at the side of the drive in various places where it gets blocked.

The garden has been a bit neglected, but it has had some work to keep it usable. We shortly need to do something about preparing it for the winter and planting peas and beans for spring.

On top of all that we have someone who is helping get the work on the house going a couple of days a week and often the work involves two people. So far he has dug out much of the earth in the outdoor kitchen in preparation for laying the floor. It doesn't really show in the photos, but all the floor except by the walls (we have left that until the last moment so there is no danger of disturbing the foundations) has been dug down to a depth of around 10cm - the rubble has mostly been put over the corner of the drive with quite a few big rocks saved for building retaining walls and stuff later (if thrown over the corner of the drive they roll and bounce down the field which isn't ideal!)

Doug and Mr Helper have done some work to stabilise the chimney so that hopefully we can remove the supporting post - at least for long enough to get concrete poured under it. You can see the post in the photo - once it is removed the ground under it can be dug out too and the new floor laid. The concreted bit doesn't really show, but is just above the beam at the top of the photo.