Snow for a start.☃️

The year 2025 is now upon us and isn’t there something satisfying about reaching 25? We have now finished all our current plans for the holiday cottages and cabins: we first started about 8 years ago with renovating Lacet and then lastly the Gardener’s Bothy in May 2024. It is always a mixture of emotions when you finish a project; you are pleased it is all over with and, sad that it is all over with. However there is still much to be done.

Digging in the snow.

We started the year with some very cold weather. The snow fell and then the temperature dropped to below zero and so the ground froze and it got very chilly. It caused some problems- snow and ice blocking the entrance to Highgate for example. Luckily I caught Chris before half the county asked him to come and move their snow drifts. He annd his manitou soon piled to snow up and out of the way. Alan and Max lent a helping hand too, digging one guest out of the snow. It looks so lovely, but snow can cause the odd headache.

Rot or Not?

Snow can make you smile, buy dry rot never does. Alan found some rot on the black passage just before Christmas, not great timing, but things like this are never welcome whenever they arrive. The floor boards had to come up and the plaster had to be scraped back to the stonework. The whole area and boards all needed to be treated. Let’s hope it has removed all traces. But the issue with dry rot is that you never know that you have done enough. You see, you can’t see if some spores have escaped and made their home somewhere else in the house, ready to make themselves known at a future date. Best not to think about this sort of thing too much, or you’d go mad.

Repair or renew?

The buildings in the quadrangle have been in need of a bit of TLC for a few years. However we had to prioritise building the cabins at Highgate. Following on from the storms and particularly storm Eowyn, we had to act. We could have tried some substantial repairs, but in the end we have decided to re-roof the whole L-shaped section. Scaffolding has now been erected, ready for Shaun. Gary and Martin to strip the roof and put in the new trusses. Then later on in March, Jamie and his team with come and put the lid back on and make the barns water-tight. We try to improve things as we go so Shaun has been tasked with putting doors onthe barns so we can use them for storage.

Thus it is has been a busy year so far, even though we are only half way through February. Looking forward to the rest of 2025.