Water Water Everywhere...Except In The Taps

It's been a little while but really that is because not a lot has happened in the dreary winter days since my last post. We continue to be besieged by plumbing problems down here on the farm. It might actually be more accurate to say that we have been besieged by weather problems. Waiting for a two day weather window in February which is either dry or not sub-zero is a bit like waiting for Donald Trump to say something which is either intelligent or not entirely stupid. Without this necessary weather window we (as so often when writing about the farm we, in this instance, means the big G) are unable to cast the concrete lid for our septic tank (did I mention this was going to be such a glamorous post?!). In addition, the pipes that should be carrying glorious water from our bore hole to our taps have fallen foul of jack frost and are all completely rotten. As a rotten water pipe is as much use as a carpenters ladder we find ourselves still without tap-delivered water.

The irony is not lost on us however as we shelter from the quite frankly biblical amount of rain that we have been having over the last week. Today there is literally water running in every conceivable direction outside the caravan!

☹️

 I know that I have mentioned this before, but not having free flowing running water has really made me realise just how much water we do use on a daily basis. One of my best friends Marcus has been trying to make this point to me for years, usually in response to my incredulous exclamations at the brevity of his showers (seriously, he has the speediest shower technique known to mankind!). It has however taken until now for me to fully appreciate how much water we pour down the drain. Bear with me here, there is a point. We are currently buying our drinking water in 5 litre bottles from our local super market. We then re-use these bottles and use the currently untested water from our borehole for all things that need boiled water like  baths (of the tin variety for little man), hand washing, washing up, cleaning the toilet etc etc and other such glamorous pastimes. Everyday we get through at least 8 of these bottles and  it sometimes feels like all I do is pour water from 5 litre bottles into kettles. As a result with every kettle I boil I think about how I can reuse water. Don't get me wrong I am not talking about reusing the washing up water to cook the vegetables but I can now see why siblings used to be bathed together. So, I now steam lots more vegetables (usually over the daily quota of potatoes that the boys demand); I don't drain vegetables (potatoes) that have been boiled anymore but take them out of the pan and reuse the water for other veg later. None of this is particularly interesting or glamorous (sorry) or even that noble but it is important...in a world where it is very easy to sit at home and lambast the politicians of our age we must make sure that we are accountable for our own actions, however trivial they may appear. Convenience after all does not equal morality.   

On a positive and less ranty note at least the sodden ground is now soft enough for us to plant the orchard which currently looks like this!

A very sad looking orchard!

And we have our first hinged gate!

Gate #1

More progress to follow when we have made some.

Three Reasons Why This Is Not The Hell You Are Imagining

After a flurry of supportive messages following my last post, I feel duty bound to clarify a few things:

1. We are warm - we have a huge wood burner that feeds radiators throughout the caravan and gets it nice and toasty. In fact some evenings we end up in t-shirts because the burner is so hot! The only cold bit of the day is first thing in the morning. This is easily remedied though with a paraffin heater and some early morning cuddles in bed together before we all get up and get dressed. 
2. We do have water - it just doesn't come out of taps yet! We have two kettles that are always on the boil for hand-washing, bathing little man and washing up. Between the gym, my Ma's house and the tin bath in front of the fire we are squeaky clean.
3. The dream is very much still alive and kicking in our little corner of Somerset helped by the may millions of stars that we can see at night before we go to bed and the symphony of the dawn chorus that is not drowned out by cars or rowdy neighbours.

Who could fail to be happy when this is how your day starts

Winter Progress

Ever since this madcap journey to Dream Farm began we have been besieged by calls of madness. Madness at the amount of land we have taken on. Madness at the enormity of the project, but mainly our friends and family have talked about the madness of moving into a caravan in Winter!

Once we realised that we would complete on Dream Farm in October it quickly became apparent that we would have to rent out our house pronto and thus that we would have to move into the caravan in deepest darkest winter. We were very lucky that we immediately found a lovely family to take on our old home but this gave us an additional deadline of pre-Christmas which in the end we took quite literally and moved in the day before Christmas Eve. This was not, I might add, for the want of trying or the fantastic show of help and support from a great group of friends with vans, cars and good will. As an aside I cannot recommend highly enough the worth of a day moving house with friends. What should have been a stressful and difficult day was actually really fun and productive (this of course had nothing to do with the fact that due to the whole being preggers thing the most I could do was direct proceeding and make tea!). In the end we managed to do in a day what would have taken us weeks to do on our own and I spent a lot of the day laughing.

We always knew that initially progress would be slow. This is after all a long-term, forever-home project so nothing is going to happen overnight. There is a little part of me that thinks we will eternally be living in a semi-built chaos blind to the incompleteness that surrounds us but for now let's stick to the ideal scenario that one day we will have built (and finished) our dream home. Whichever way you look at it though it is going to take us a while. We have planners, neighbours (well one or two) the council, and frozen ground to get through after all and that's before we have even started to raise the money to actually build this supposed new home of ours. However we have actually done quite a lot in the short time that we have been the owners of this little corner of paradise.

The path(s): When they say that things must get worse before they get better they definitely had making paths in a field in the winter in mind! In the last few months we have taken a lovely, overgrown and neglected field and carved a series paths in to it! It is going to look wonderful when it is properly landscaped and seeded but for now it is a big fat scar waiting for kinder weather.

Beautiful field

New path behind the barn

Sometime when you're carving paths you find caves!

The quarry: the first thing we did on completion was to ask local farmer 'Farmer Dave' to come and chop down the weeds and flatten the anthills. There are, I dare say a fair few million ants who were not very happy with this but we now have a level, green space perfect for all our amazing plans.

The Quarry before on cold completion day

The Quarry now in crisp winter mode

Pimping the caravan: I am starting to get in to trouble for painting a picture of squalor and deprivation. Despite the lack of running water we are not simply living in a caravan. We (Big G) have built a porch and a beautiful shepherds hut bedroom to make the space a little more liveable and to accommodate our soon to be swelling family.

Le Caravan

Building the new porch to attache the Shepherd's Hut to the caravan

Extended dwelling, boot room, wood store and space for fridge freezer - see not too shabby at all!

Amassing some fun farm equipment: the logic, so I am told, goes a little something like: we own a farm therefore I must buy a tractor and a dumper truck. 

Tractor boy.

Water: We still don't actually have water that we can access, but we do have a 42 metre hole in the ground which, once the water pump is fitted, will pull water up into our soon to be erected water tank and then into (drum roll please) our TAPS! Whether or not we can then heat said water remains to be seen but I for one am happy with any sort of tap water.

May not look like much but this friends is our bore hole

Getting closer and closer to actually being able to pump water out of the ground

slurry slurry slurry!

Plans: We now have the first two drafts of our plans but more on this in my next post, complete with pictures.