People are quite curious about your cleaning habits when you live in a yurt, and are not in possession of a bathroom. Rather wonderfully, we have a number of neighbours who are very generous with their facilities. Brendan and Della, who look down on us from the Bron, are generous shower offerers; we do have to time our ablutions with them on a non school night though, because of the wine intake. We popped up there the other night and Della just happened to cook enough food for all of us. Showers with extras, how cool is that?Brendan also happens to be a plumber, and it looks like he's coming on board with the build which is exciting.
Pat and John live across the river and again they are fantastic about us nipping over for a shower, it's a very sociable affair, normally with a cup of tea or a pint of bitter. John has been an electrician and has also offered to help out where he can. He also knows all the wildlife in the area and is just an incredible fount of information. He also used to garden and we've already had rhubarb, yellow flag iris and rasberry canes from him. They are extremely kind people.
Helen and Simon live up on the bog and again are a very sociable bath experience. Helen was once heard to say, in the local shop, that as her water had stopped running she needed 6 bottles of wine... Simon also happens to be a carpenter! As a consequence of using their bathroom, we are now going to their wedding which sounds more like a mini festival.
Then Liz and Dudley at the local B and B in the village itself have always said that their water is hot should we need a shower/bath.
So there you all go - that's how we keep clean, and how we've been getting to know the neighbours.
How many different questions can you answer in a day? Well it would seem an almost infinite variety when you are building your own home.
As we mentioned in our brief last blog, it's all gone a bit busy. The builders have started! It's led to some rather dramatic consequences. As the floor was being dug out the south wall began to show some rather large stress fractures. This wall was always coming down anyhow. It's where the sun room is and the top is made of poor brickwork and bodged stonework. So we were pretty cool about that, until we noticed some more stress fractures in the two walls leading off from that.
Anyhow to cut a long story short... well, we only have a little bit of the barn left, large areas just fell away. So shockingly the direction of our barn has changed somewhat, instead of: repair work, insulating internally, limecrete floors and extreme steels in the roof, it looks like we'll be: starting from scratch in parts of the barn, using durasol blocks (which will give us all our insulation), possibly different flooring (limecrete is suddenly an extremely expensive option with the extra we would now need), and different engineering requirements. We were tormented by the limecrete floor as we felt it was particularly necessary with underfloor heating, but apparently not.
So, to ensure that we can afford solar water heating and a stove with a back boiler on it, we have opted for .... concrete flooring. It's shocking to a green fascist like me that we have gone down this route but to not could have cost us 6-8k instead of a 2k - that difference is the solar panel and the stove . Difficult choices, which are sometimes made for you. On the bright side we shouldn't need any new stones as we have plenty.
Oh and builders do seem great. Woodsy is a character; we were somewhat disturbed to hear him shriek "here's Jonny" as he smashed, rather redundantly now, through a blocked up door way. Neil is a more traditional builder but has a fairly broad mind and may be amused by our eccentric little ways. They have also got that we are not "straight lines" people, in that we want rugged walls with little holes and ledges - it's great for birds, bats, insects and lichens you see. Neatness is never good for wildlife.
We have also had thrown at us the coldest winter in years. A spectacular month of frosts in which we were both horrendously ill; then there was a week of snow, which trapped us in. Fantastic! However now spring is definitely peeking round the skirts of winter. Everything is giving a good old stretch. Owls are shrieking again, different message this time - it's more "oiy come over 'ere luv". Birds are definitely warming up, it's getting noisy in the morning. Buds are emerging on trees. Bumble bees have been sighted. The honey bees are out, pooing apparently. The celandines are in flower. I even saw a marsh marigold flouncing around down by the river.
In the polytunnel we have: broad beans coming into flower, peas a good 5 inches above the ground, rhubarb looking rather delightful, rocket out of your ears, spinach a go go, chinese veg, cabbage, strawberries starting to flower, lettuces and sweet peas. Outside the garlic is looking great, the huge orchard is looking exciting (thanks mom, Charlie and Julian), vegetable beds are being dug, the purple sprouting is just starting to show its' flowers, the secret garden has snowdrops and daffs by the hundred, plus all the wild daffodils, wild tulips and ransoms, I planted last year, are looking very exciting, with the ransoms just starting to produce flower heads. The "shrubbery" is starting to grow. Thanks to Christmas presents from Tim, Lisa, Tamsin, Sharon and Peter we now have many crab apples, cherry plums, rowan, dog woods and hornbeam.
James saw the frogs all at it on the 24th of Feb; no surprise then when we saw our first frog spawn in our pond on the 25th Feb! There's loads of it.
Anyhow there are more photos of the barn on the website www.themaidensbarn.co.uk/imagegalleries.html. We'll try and keep it all up to date .. now where's the valium?
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