My last blog, 2 weeks ago, said that we were focusing on the refurb of Hayloft and that has been my principal task. In the blog, I said that the intention was to do all the preparation prior to starting to repaint. That preparation has taken longer than anticipated!
You will have seen from one of the photos of the refurb last time that I am attempting to do the work around much of the furniture that we have moved to the centre of the space as we don’t have enough spare space to move it to! This has proved more challenging than I’d anticipated and has slowed things down a bit.
What has slowed things down more is as I continued to scrape and prepare the surfaces for paint, I discover other areas that were a little less sold than we believed, leading to more cutting out and either scarfing in new wood, covering and / or filling once made good.
I now think we have finally arrived at a point when I should be able to apply paint from tomorrow having spent all of Friday sanding and getting covered in dust! This is all just in the living area, the bathroom will follow …
Sadly, scraping, sanding and filling don’t make for great photos (not helped by working around the covered furniture) but hopefully this shows some of the work required comparing to how it was when we started. Once painted it shouldn’t be visible.
While Hayloft’s refurbishment is the main focus, we have the normal day-to-day tasks and general ‘admin’ required as well as a couple of other, smaller jobs including getting the lawn in the orchard cut for the first time in months. As it was quite long it took rather longer than usual and will take a few weeks to get it looking great for the summer.
The back lawn (in front of the pool build) I haven’t touched yet as we’re hoping the landscaper will come back soon to dig another trench and do some levelling before it recovers and Granary’s lawn has been destroyed over the winter by a mole (molested?) so needs some TLC itself.
Another of these smaller jobs was to take some of the leylandii trunk to a friend for splitting. The leylandii was felled in October 2023 in preparation for starting the pool build and had been stacked inside the back gate since. Our friend occasionally has access to a powerful wood splitter and he was kind enough to allow us to bring the wood that we needed splitting. I have now managed to store the logs in the dry where they can season over the next couple of years although, being leylandii we are more likely to use them in the firepit rather than the stoves.
Also we needed to order, and then collect, some wood required for the pool house. The idea is for the building to be visually similar to the garage so giving some coherence to the new builds. The garage was built with a wooden frame using large Douglas pine posts at each corner.
With the pool house being a breeze block build, I am going to get the same visual by creating similar ‘posts’ using planks that we have ordered from a local saw mill in Huelgoat which we collected in the week. We’re (desperately) hoping, as we are now in meteorological spring, that the weather will improve and we can progress the project with the terrace.
(Something else we collected this week, was this season’s soaps and shampoo we give to guests which we buy from a local artisan and are made only a 20 minute walk from Kergudon).
We do keep our Sundays free to walk and last Sunday, as the weather was extremely windy, we decided to do something more local and returned to the fabulous Huelgoat forest. However, we decided to choose a route we hadn’t walked before and one, while it is marked on the map, isn’t a signposted route and so isn’t walked frequently. As such, it still hadn’t been cleared since the major storm that hit in November 2023 and the path was blocked in lots of places by large fallen trees.
We came across a sizeable clearing that looked as though it had been created by the storm decimating the trees and leaving others exposed to new strong winds. Some had evidently fallen recently with this year’s storms where as others looked as though it is only a matter of time before they come down too …
Next week will be continuing with Hayloft when other tasks allow!
Kenavo.