March Monthly Update
March is here, and spring is springing. The sun is starting to warm our bones, and March means that I personally crawl out of my annual SAD spell and become a much more chaotic, excitable and productive human being. The change for me is almost overnight, and it startles Dan every time. Speaking of Dan, for him March means wondering which day of the week he can squeeze cutting the grass into. The answer is none but it’ll get done anyway!
As always, there’ll be a lot in this one, so use the links to skip to each week as we move through the month:
Week 2 (to be done)
Week 3 note: There won’t be a Week 3 update, as we’re hosting a major event all week!
March Week 1:
I am writing this on Friday as we have a full weekend here! This week was all about the wet dog room, and after asking you on socials what the type of flooring is that I have in my head, you all delivered. I found an installer, the flooring, the wall coverings and we were all systems go on finishes, until we came to replace the back door. I’ll circle back to this point and it will make sense then, but just know, this room might not end up being how I want it to be this year - which will suck. Put a pin in that!
Alright, so - exactly 1 week ago (Friday), the wet dog room looked like this:
At the very end of last week (Sunday), the only stills I have of where we ended up are here:
Dan continued with adding the stud work to the wall brackets
Next was insulation in the new ceiling and along that roofline. Dan had already extended to perlins with wood to allow for 150mm PIR up there, along with the required air gap behind. It was a case of cutting, push-fitting, chasing the wires through (3 spotlights, a carbon monoxide alarm and a smoke alarm), and then taping the joins:
Pausing on the room work here because at this exact point, the Plumbers arrived (Tuesday). They were here to do three things:
Add pipework to install a radiator in the wet dog room that has never existed before
Remove the downstairs shower room's crappy radiator and move the pipework to allow for a 1800mm towel rail next to the shower
Re-do the connections to the upstairs bathrooms radiators from microbore pipe (awful stuff) and lag everything.
This involved chopping up end-of-life bits, removing redundant bits, creating entirely new bits, and fitting them all around very uneven stone walls. They did it all perfectly, then refilled the central heating system. We’re all set for the wall build-out, and both new radiators are now also on site.
Back into the wet dog room, next up was protecting that insulation (and the ceiling void) from any rogue moisture from the internals with a vapour control layer. The external wall is having insulated plasterboard on, so it too had a VCL, and then the internal wall and external wall also got another internal rain jacket with a moisture control layer too:
Then Dan had to stop because it was time to stud the last remaining wall - the external door wall.
This external door has very rarely been shown because for the last two years, it’s been the least secure element of the entire property. As you can see below, it was end of life, and there’s zero way a Malinois (Ren) could be in the same room as a piece of flimsy cardboard that she could literally just run through.
^ a visual of the condition of the old external door…
This door needed to be changed now, because it would have been a big question mark for mortgageability. It is not secure. At all. This is where we need to unpin the bit we pinned from earlier about the flooring and things…
Explaining the decisions:
On the farmhouse, there are 23 windows (most quite large), and 4 external doors, including one which is actually double French doors. As a comparison, the cottage has 13 windows and 2 doors, with 2 windows of comparable size. The most budget-friendly windows & doors for the cottage (we did upgrade from PVC to composite for the doors) cost around £12,500. The cost of putting what we want into the farmhouse will be at least triple that. Brand new doors and windows for the farmhouse are not a 2026 job. They can’t be, we’ll need to save for a fair while!
The windows and doors here (except this door) didn’t need to be changed for finance, so they were put further down the list, even though every room will be disturbed again when they all do get changed. We knew that – we know that. That’s not so much of an issue elsewhere, but this specific external door is problematic, especially when considering fairly spendy floor and wall coverings like the ones we all picked together last week.
We ummed and ahhed about purchasing just one brand new external door for here, but we have other pressures which mean this can’t wait until a door on order arrives, and we also want to get all 4 doors at the same time. The French doors on the same elevation are white PVC. We have a second-hand (possibly third-hand?!) white PVC door sat in a shed (the cottage’s old back door), which is perfectly functional and locks well. Given all the things happening right now (some you know, most you don’t), we opted to just fit the door we have.
Even though it’s white PVC.
^ For everyone who knows me and my bizarre love of nice doors, you’ll know this cuts me deep.
Circling back to this specific door opening, the old door is 110mm taller than the door we have to hand, but otherwise the same dimensions. This elevation gets absolutely battered by the weather but the top of the door opening isn’t shaped particularly well to allow for a shorter door to remain fully protected without a 115mm slab of white PVC and some very irregular mastic to try and protect it all with hopes and prayers. Advice we’ve received from pros who know the property was to not attempt to fill a gap above the door; instead, we should lift the door and fill/mortar over that instead for now. So that’s what we did.
This will be incredibly controversial, but frankly, we do not care (sorry!). All the elements considered equally, it’s the best of a sticky spot and will tide us over perfectly well until the new doors in 2027 (maybe, could be 2028).
That year gap means that the floor line will change then too, as the new door will be set back by 50mm ish, maybe more. If we go with spendy flooring now, there’s no way of fixing that bit neatly in the future without ripping the floor and the spendy wall coverings off too, which is silly. I believe the floor will have joins in it anyway (only comes in 2m wide rolls), so we may as well just have an offcut ready to go and re-weld this bit in the future? Dan disagrees, and thinks we should just do a temporary standard room config for the short term of bog-standard plaster, skirting and probably vinyl on the floor given soggy dogs in here and then do it all again when the doors get fitted.
We’re currently not on the same page, the jury is well and truly out. Decision TBC.
Either way, this week Dan and I needed to get a very temperamental door into a very odd-shaped hole, complete with angled internals on the stonework and a need to find an extra 100mm on the floorline too. And with that in mind, this is what we did:
Replacing the door:
First, the removal of the old door and me madly trying to find any key that fits the old-new white PVC replacement (I found 3 - result!):
Next up, we had to find at least 100mm from something we had to hand, and one thing we have to hand most of the time is spare concrete lintels that are 100mm square. So, in the strangest use of a lintel probably ever, it became a door sill. This was bedded in and bolted through for security, but it will be removable in a years time (or 2 years, or 3). After this was in, the attention turned to getting that frame to sit within the angled walls on the inside and the lack of room on the outside to give it a flush edge anywhere. Wood was our solution, and so Dan worked to get a whole array of framing done, including shims and slivers to give a secure fit all around.
With 4000 checks to make sure everything was level, we added a strip of DPM and copious sealant on the concrete sill/step and then the door frame was screwed into the stone walls, through the wood on the sides, to completion. The test was whether this old door would close, and if it did close, would it lock?
The answer was yes and yes, the first time too. It closed and locked better than it ever did in the Cottage 😅
At the time of writing, Dan was just adding the PVC trim to the externals, protecting the wood and sealing the opening fully from all angles (last photo below).
You can see the size of the step from inside to outside in those screenshots, and you can also see the size of the step from outside to inside (twice as tall). From outside to inside is an uncomfortable height, but we have a lot of stone here, from granite blocks to sandstone slabs and everything inbetween. We’ll pop a step or two here temporarily to tide us over.
The point is, we now have a house with 4 openings that all have solid doors, all those doors actually lock, and none can be broken through by a bouncy Malinois.
Ooh, I almost forgot…
Dan went to A&E, AGAIN.
Whilst he was angle grinding concrete lintels into neat little angles to fit the opening, I suggested he should don a mask and safety specs. I could find a mask, but no specs. He went without - committed to the job and not to health and safety, as always.
He was then cutting wood with the circular saw, dust blowing all over the shop, and a bit of dust went into his eye. We finished the door fitting, fed the dogs, brought the horses in, and it still wasn’t right. On examination, and after copious saline washes, he still had something dark and tiny stuck over his pupil, and it wouldn’t budge. The eye looked bad - it was 6:30pm on a Thursday night so A&E was the only option left.
We swung by the takeaway, then dropped Dan at A&E with me waiting in the car to eat my pizza. 3 hours later, Dan returned minus the tiny shard of metal that had stuck into his cornea, right over the pupil. The shard was probably from the circular saw blade itself, and it was removed with a giant needle. Now he has to have eye ointment 4 times a day for a couple of weeks. He also received 40 pairs of safety specs the next morning (I can shop and eat), which he proceeded to wear for every single task, as he should.
Thank goodness for the NHS.
THEN, today (Friday), Dan was doing those outside sealing and PVC bits as mentioned, but he was also framing up the inside of the doorway too. I’d asked for angled reveals on each side, to match the stonework there, and that’s what he’s building now. At the time of writing, Friday at 6pm, the room looks like this with the right side framed and the left still to do:
There’s been other things arriving this week, those sliding double doors for the arch-not-an-arch and a very much needed harrow and roller for the quad. We need to get the grassland sorted before we switch to too dry to do anything.
Oh, and we’re also on the final 7 day countdown to the start of the SC26 Photography Retreat… it’s a busy month, so I best go do some work!