Nearly finished (hahahahahaha!)

 Work in progress…

Just a tiny bit of squaring off the edges and a bit of a hoover to clean up the mess, and job done!

Not one, but three…

The front opening is the biggest and the most stressful - because of already having been mangled about and huge amounts of super hard concrete in there, but there are two others being done at the same time…

One here in the end wall from what will be kitchen/dining in to the outdoor kitchen

One upstairs in what will be the living room

The supports are in for both of these now too. Just waiting for the lime to dry a bit before hacking them out too…

Destroy! Widening the door…

 Graham the builder seems very confident, but I am a nervous wreck! I don’t want my house collapsed and I don’t want Doug to be squished (in reverse order of priority of course…)

That beam you can see on the left is just supported by 3 acrow props. It holds not only the floor upstairs up but also the A frame supporting the roof. Glup!

Building back better - 2 of the new beams in place. Feels less scary now. The old beams will sit on these new steel ones. The door won’t be this high in the end as under the beams there will be a roller shutter and fly screen.

Nearly ready!

This is part of why doing anything takes so long! It took 2 half days going to Bernard Page to get the I beam needed for the 3 doors/windows.

They were very helpful though and now we have them (after minor setback when we turned up to collect them and they had done 3 x 4m lengths instead of 4 x 3m lengths. That would have been a super large window!)

The big beams for the window at the front weigh nearly 100kg, it’s going to be a good job getting them in to place!

 

Frenzy of preparation!

A builder is starting work next week (working with Doug) to add a new door and window and enlarge an existing door. We have been in a frenzy of preparation for what feels like years now.

Taking some floor boards up because we need access here to support the wall while we widen the door below.

Ceiling below that gone too

This is the door to be widened downstairs

Bloody cows, bloody neighbors, bloody heatwave/drought

Wandering around a really steep field well after sunset chasing the neighbors cows out of one of our fields. AGAIN. It wouldn’t be so bad, but it is still hot given the heatwave and this field has pretty much the only grass left for the cows, the rest has shriveled up in the heatwave.

Pretty though…

Drought!

Normally the sheep refuse point blank to eat hay, even in winter they prefer to scrape around for what little grass they can get. The last week they have been begging for hay and scoffing it down enthusiastically, all the grass has frazzled to a crisp. Really hoping this is a one off, else we are going to have to cut down numbers.