Journey of a Barn: Survey

In the beginning

Rich had been browsing the internet and keeping his eyes open for a "project" for some considerable time. He found this barn by pure chance on the internet and visited it a couple of times without me - he didnt want me wearing rose tinted glasses before he had checked a few things out! However, on my first visit unfortunately the glasses did come out and I fell in love with it.

The barn itself sits in just under half an acre of land. It is a limestone barn and the attached "buildings" are corregated iron and wood. These will come down completely and be rebuilt in limestone, but the barn will stay as much as possible with original features.

Firstly

We had to discuss with our girls what we were contemplating as it was going to affect them quite considerably -well living in a caravan for a year or so wasn't quite what they were used to! Em was ok as she is pretty independent but it was going to be more difficult for Amy as she hadn't at that point passed her driving test. However the week before we moved in December 2009 she passed her test which meant we had another car to buy but at least everyone was mobile.

We made arrangements to put our caravan on the Greenhill Leisure Park at Bletchingdon for the interim period until we could move our caravan on to our land at the barn. We also stay for odd nights with family and friends and, because we got withdrawal symptoms from not being down at our caravan in Warmwell, we had a weekend down at Weymouth

Sunday, 27 June 2010

Survey

We had a survey done to check how far the piled foundations needed to go down - it wasn't good news, they would need to go down nearly 30 feet and therefore wanted a lot of extra money as this wasn't what had been anticipated and quoted for! Our builders were fantastic and they have sorted things out with our building inspector and between them agreed we could do "normal" foundations however it meant going down about 10 feet for the majority of them. Some of them are a bit less so Rich could just see over the top of the shallower ones.... it does mean that we have loads of earth/clay to get rid of - lorry loads and loads and loads and loads... it is free to a good home if anyone wants some