Six long days ...

One of the problems of doing something important for the first, and possibly the last, time in one's life is that there's no body of knowledge, no experience, no way of knowing if this is the right way to do something. That's what employing somebody to do something gets you. After Gérard had finished the roof Adam said to me "We could have done that". Well, quite possibly we could but certainly not in the same time or to the same standard and consistency - that's what experience and learning from twenty years of doing the same thing provides. Oh, and there's no way either of us could have walked up the roof unprotected either.

Transferring the orange lighthouse into a smooth insulated sub-floor with electric and water services running underneath took a long time, a very long time.Laying the 80mm thick tongue and grooved polyurethane boards was straightforward enough when the floor was flat and it was a big area but, despite the way our  architect saw the world, the walls in a 200 year old building aren't straight and laying the service ducts was very slow. So, in the end, it took us five days to get all the 120 square metres of the ground floor covered:

 

The next job was to lay the 650m of underfloor heating cables, fortunately we had a plan provided by the supplier, unfortunately I'd omitted to give them a few critical pieces of information like the layout of the utility room and that we had moved the stairs from the architect's plan. However a bit of elementary maths and some imaginative cable routing meant that we got all the heating runs in successfully:

Division of roles was important - Adam turned out to be a master at unrelling the cable so it laid flat on the floor.

Are you sure we've got enough?

The full length of the barn seen from the door into the lean-to

And looking the other way from the house

 

 

 

The cabling team in action - we do take commissions for this sort of work

It seems to be a fundamental law of building that when you are working inside the weather outside is great and so these five days carried us through the warm end of March weather that the UK has been experiencing. The continual sunshine however did enable us to realise how much more light is coming into the barn through the new doorway and opening above the barn doors. There are still two big windows to go into the north wall which will allow more light in and so we hope we will have got rid of the curse of many old barns which is very restricted outside light.

Last Wednesday Steve the electrician came along and took measurements of all the seven heating cables to ensure that they hadn't been damaged during installation (they hadn't). Steve then changed hats and plumbed in the new underfloor water pipe which means that, at last, we can deconstruct the Heath Robinson arrangement hanging from the barn ceiling and walls that has brought water to the house for the past two years.