Welcome to my blog, where a 30-something couple from the UK renovate and extend an old cottage, build some outbuildings, raise some hens and grow firewood trees and vegetables on our Acre in Hampshire. It's a bit like a smallholding but without too many animals, so we call it a homestead - living within our means, relying on ourselves and having a wonderful life!


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Monday, 2 February 2015

Final Oak Delivery

So, the last delivery of green oak arrived this morning - containing everything I need to finish the timber frame for the barn. I found the whole process extremely easy, mostly because I was at work and missed all the excitement! Kristy was a champion, directing LGV drivers, telehandlers and generally being a great site foreman. I stopped short of criticising her for lack of safety boots, helmet or high-vis jacket - she took some great pictures which made up for her Health-and-Safety shortfall.

This was a picture of our drive at 0745hrs this morning - the telehandler and driver were provided at very short notice by Dickie, the chap who did our groundworks.



Some well-deserved advertising and a link for the fabulous Venables Oak - they have been SO helpful throughout, tolerating my repeated phone calls and panicked changes to my order. They fitted delivery around us - even changing the driver's schedule so that we were home. Great people to deal with!

Here is part of our order - a pack containing 55 square meters of oak cladding for the barn - there is just shy of £1000 of cladding on the telehandler's forks!

And here it is - one flat-pack 85 square meter barn in kit-form. Upright posts on the left, facing rafters and wall plates in the middle, internal-garage-storage-bit and doorframes on the right.

To save working space, our amazing neighbour Brooksy let me borrow a bit of space in his farmyard for the oak cladding...

...and the tie beams. These are real monsters - over 7 meters long, 7 inches square and weighing a quarter of a ton each.

Kristy's brother Luke is coming to stay for a few days this week, and the plan will be to stack the cladding with timber stringers to let it air, before we start making some more sawdust - and building the barn! I'm hoping we can also start making the apparatus I'll use to move the monster beams about - a clever devise called a Logging Arch, not dissimilar to this;

...which can then be used to bring home logs from our local permissive woods. 

Too many projects on the go!
































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1 comment:

  1. Hannah White3 February 2015 at 04:35

    Legend, I would really love to know how it all goes together.... is there an flat pack guide you have created!! What are all the bits and where do they go......??? x

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