The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Community => Coffee Lounge => Topic started by: farmershort on September 21, 2016, 09:29:13 am
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Hi All,
Thought I'd do a little update based on our 1st 2 months in our new smallholding in Devon.
As some of you may remember, we had a thoroughly painful buying experience, and it took over 15 weeks to finally complete the purchase. After all of that nonesense, we finally moved in on July 21st.....
We baled small-bale hay on July 22nd...
and I had a broken little toe from the start of that week! my god, that was a baptism of fire.
We ended up saving about 300-400 bales of hay, then leaving another 600+ out in the field to sadly get wet and ruined. We've been slowly working our way through disposing of the wet ones. The dry ones are under tarps until the goes up.
I feel a list coming on, this is what we've done so far:
- Baled and stored some hay, wasted some other hay - thankfully a local farmer came and took some round bales from the rest of the crop - the baling contractor could see we were broken.... 26 acres all had to be cut.
- Cut a 3.3m wide hole in the front of the house - ready for bifold doors on the south-facing side.... this will become the kitchen/diner, and wil be the 1st room we modernise and live in
- Knocked down an internal wall diving the old kitchen from one of the reception rooms
- Cleared a 5 acre field of 60+ years of hedge overgrowth - seriously hard work
- Fencing contractors are due to finish fencing this week on above 5 acre field
- Sewage treatment plant installed - this hurt the wallet! The old "septic tank" was a 6' x 4' brick hole... 8ft deep, filled with nastyness.... open topped too!
- Discovered a 9 inch sewer main running into the middle of one of our fields, carrying at least 3 houses septic tank run-offs.... not a happy chappy about this, but dealing with it in a politically sensitive way. No one has a right of drainage here, but it's a very very old salt-glazed clay pipe.... much easier to offer people a right of drainage, and set conditions that it has to be clean water drainage.
- Groundworks for the new driveway and barn are underway as we speak, an the 1st 60 tonne lorry load of stone arrived 30 mins ago. a 60ft x 30ft timber framed barn will be going up next week.
- Sparky booked to start in the next couple of weeks to do a total rewire of the house - currently based on bacolite fittings, with 1 socket per room.
- Heading to holmfirth this weekend to collect our first sheep (of this place)... 20 or 30 whitefaced woodland ewes, and a ram or two.
- ramshackle-repaired an old 1940's/50's stuart turner piston pump which had chewed up one of it's valve return springs. It's currently using the back-water-pressure to close that valve between cycles, which works.... but the pump now takes at least twice as long to fill the tank. New pump is on standby - hopefully the old one lasts out until the barn goes up, and we can reconfigure the water supply.
- bifold fitters coming on Oct 6th or 7th to finally seal up the big hole in the front of the house - currently weather-tightness is provided by a few sheets of plywood...
- bought a 2007 DP120 sheep trailer :)
I probably should have prefaced the above by saying that the house was built in the 50's, and hasn't been touched since (apart fom being lived in).... The land is in a similar position, no stock has been on it for 30 years, and that would have been cattle. Hedges have grown so wild that there's semi-mature hardwood trees on the wrong side of ditches.... I'd say it's at least 50 or 60 years since real care was taken.
We finally finished chainsawing on sunday night, as it got dark, and it's taken till today for the pins and needles in my fingers to go!
I'm starting to realise that we've hit it pretty hard, but we're so happy that we made it here, and we're able to make it our own. It wont be long before the savings run out, and then all this activity will peter out.
The more drawn out issue that's hanging over us at the moment is this sewage main thing. Almost the whole village used to be owned by the same one farm, our place included.... the sewage main was probably installed by them to service the farm workers cottages, as well as the main house. It's certainly served it's time well, but the pipe outflow is very close to a ditch, which is itself far less than a mile from a famous river... The EA would have a bloomin field day... Thankfully we've recitified our sewage system so it's only clean water coming out now.... but these other houses are going to be faced with 2 options... either individual sewage treatment plants with cleanwater drainage into the same pipe, or else some sort of complicated scenario whereby a group treatment plant is installed in the path of the pipe - most likely on our land - with a maintenance charge etc.... Clearly I'd prefer the first option.
The sewage groundworker chaps told me that by 2020, if you don't know where your sewage run-off is going, or if it's against the regs, you wont be able to sell your house.... Not sure if that's the letter of the law exactly, but it'd be a worry.
there we go, that's our small update - lots of work, some progress, and sheep arriving on sunday :D
Adam
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Wow what a fantastic oppportunity you have in your new home. :sunshine:
So much to do - but the rest of your lives to do it in. Good luck with all your challenges. :thumbsup:
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Take a :bow: or :surrender:
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Thanks both!
I forgot to mention about having the kitchen on order, and having 3 cubes of concrete going into the old front reception room (now diner half of the kitchen/diner) to raise the floor level to match the kitchen half... that concrete work starts on saturday. which means tonight we're on ripping up floorboards and joists, and then laying DPM and celotex.
:bow:
sadly all of the above means it's going to be some time before I get some pocket money to go tractor hunting! lots of free exercise in the mean time though.
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So what are you doing in your spare time? :-)
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Great update! Love to hear what you've been up to and how it's all going. You'll have to keep updating us. ;D
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Sounds like you've been a wee bit busy. :roflanim:
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Great start to your story - keep the updates coming - need some pictures though :eyelashes:
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yes pictures will come soon, I'll add them to this thread....
forgot to mention that we've also managed to arrange to get some goats from TAS member [member=26309]jaykay[/member] - She has a couple of lovely Old English Goats which need a new home, and we're very excited about them becoming our house milkers. I think we've said sometime in October for the pickup - once they've been to the Billy.
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All sounds very good, well done!
All the best :thumbsup:
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Blimey that's a lot going on, if your ever coming past Dawlish you can drop 40 wet hay off here (I'll use them as a base for a Devon bank)
Good luck with your plans