Due to only having a short term let on our house Mrs Bling set about looking for a new place, the one she found happened to be owned by the same landlady and was only 3 fields away happy days you may think, while the wife like the place I was more concerned there was no place for my bike and tools.
The new place had some outbuildings but really not fit for purpose. After a chat with my landlady we agreed I could use the buildings if I did the work to refit them :roll: and she paid for materials. I'm not shy of a challenge and decided to under take the task. What has ensued is 5 weeks of some serious hard graft and all done while having to move house as well .
We moved house at the end of April and I started work on the out houses 2 weeks before hand. One of the sheds had a collapsed roof and not much of a front to it after ripping that out this is what I had to start with.
The first task was to install some services in the one without a roof, this involved digging a trench to connect to the waste pipe and finding the water pipe that supplied our house. the trench wound up being 3metre's long and 1 metre deep I had to dig that by hand only 3 days.
Next task was digging out the cobbled floor it had only been down for about 200 years the outhouses would have originally housed pigs so the cobbles were cemented together with 200yr old pig poo 1 mattock and 2 days later.
After fixing the loose stone work on the wall it was time to tackle the roof I got the steel from the local scrapyard and fabricated it to size and with the help of a local farmer and his tractor got it into place and the added the trusses and the battens for the slate roof.
Before tackling the other shed it had its own problem left over from its previous farming owners the shed had some asbestos guttering pipes and gully's inside as this had to be removed by specialist due to the local waste site not being able to take it, it was a week before I could start any work in there.
stay tuned for the next instalment
The new place had some outbuildings but really not fit for purpose. After a chat with my landlady we agreed I could use the buildings if I did the work to refit them :roll: and she paid for materials. I'm not shy of a challenge and decided to under take the task. What has ensued is 5 weeks of some serious hard graft and all done while having to move house as well .
We moved house at the end of April and I started work on the out houses 2 weeks before hand. One of the sheds had a collapsed roof and not much of a front to it after ripping that out this is what I had to start with.
The first task was to install some services in the one without a roof, this involved digging a trench to connect to the waste pipe and finding the water pipe that supplied our house. the trench wound up being 3metre's long and 1 metre deep I had to dig that by hand only 3 days.
Next task was digging out the cobbled floor it had only been down for about 200 years the outhouses would have originally housed pigs so the cobbles were cemented together with 200yr old pig poo 1 mattock and 2 days later.
After fixing the loose stone work on the wall it was time to tackle the roof I got the steel from the local scrapyard and fabricated it to size and with the help of a local farmer and his tractor got it into place and the added the trusses and the battens for the slate roof.
Before tackling the other shed it had its own problem left over from its previous farming owners the shed had some asbestos guttering pipes and gully's inside as this had to be removed by specialist due to the local waste site not being able to take it, it was a week before I could start any work in there.
stay tuned for the next instalment