Year: 2010

Interested to see that the sea off Wales will be home to one of the largest offshore windfarms in the world. Consisting of 160 wind turbines it should come online in 2014. I view that with a certain amount of ambivalence, on the positive side – Power from renewables has to be good.! It’s a…

Here I’ll consider architects, architectural technicians and touch on the other potentially pricey professionals such as structural engineers, that we’ll need to employ to bridge the link between the unconverted building and the building work that will convert it. The Architect I spoke with some lovely architects when I started this project. They seemed to…

What is now the kitchen in the barn was once a chicken shed, before that it housed larger animals in the two stalls. The floor was made up of mainly ridged black bricks with some cobbles around the edges. When the floor was ripped up to be replaced it was piled in the yeard where…

There are a number of places in the barn where the rough pointed internal wall joins up to a smooth plastered and painted wall or ceiling. This is one of problems that is common to conversion projects – where original materials or new materials added to replace or improve original features butt up against modern…

April was… I’ve not yet managed to wield my Fugenboy kit (‘a sealant joint tooling system that produces a professional finish with no tramlines’) to redo the sealant around the showers, but I have boxed-in the frame that the shower tray sits on with plywood ready for tiling and got on (a little bit) with…

A general question that’s long been asked and as yet never answered on My Barn Conversion was summed up by miss dee ennis back in 2006: I am thinking of buying a barn for myself … could [someone] give me a ballpark figure as to how much this is lik[e]ly to cost? miss dee ennis…

Under the time consuming triple influence of Easter-Wedding Anniversary-Birthday early April is always more devoted to indulgence than work, at least that’s my excuse for slow progress at the barn and even slower updates of MyBarnConversion.com and once you have an excuse the least you can do is use it. Anyway, it’s now mid-April, so…

…for a conversion your hands are usually tied but you’ll need to consider insulation, finishes and any remedial work. First things first, will the walls remain or do they need to come down? I’m going to assume they will remain as afterall, this is a site about CONVERSION… Some questions to be answered… Will some…

One of the main jobs that remains internally is to install doors. It actually seems a shame to put in doors and close up some of the openness of the barn at the moment, but I guess privacy and decency must prevail. There are only five doors to be installed. All doorways are between 78…

I was invited to a talk by Christopher Day in Cardiff so thought I’d take a look at his work to see just what he was about. Can’t say I established that fully, but I did find an very interesting article by Christopher that feeds into the research I’ve been undertaking recently into my sons…

While writing an upcoming post on the subject of walls, I realised that I had never properly concluded the thread that was bubbling away through 2008 concerning what to do about the leaky, south facing gable end wall. After finding it was ‘infested’ with stalactites and stalagmites, I considered whitewashing the wall, then eventually it…

I’ve been considering what to do with the second bedroom in the barn. It will be my son’s room once it’s been relieved of its current duty as store room. I’ve been planning on installing a built-in-bed, both for reasons of practicality and desire. Practical because part of the construction can be used to solve…