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.