My Barn Conversion … musings in small-house, off-grid, architecture, design with smatterings of art, history and literature

Climate Change Minister Greg Barker had plenty to say about the Green Deal in his speech at the Ecobuild conference in London yesterday.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the Raspberry Pi for a while now. What’s a Raspberry Pi? The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing…

I’ve been rattling on about the barns roof trusses / A-frame a fair bit recently, both on the forum and the roof post in my Anatomy of… series. Well here’s quite a nice photograph of the real thing… For reference, the photograph shows the right hand side of the two furthest trusses that you can…

Looks like recent negative speculation over the Green Deal may be well-founded. We now learn that Climate Change Minister Greg Barker has confirmed that the secondary legislation for the Green Deal will be delayed. The secondary legislation (the instrument through which the government is able to make changes to the law without having to pass…

Fake Arabia meets Carmarthenshire sunshine… a rare and beautiful thing… (Sitting on my newly tiled window sills.)

It looks like the politicians and energy companies are starting to pull at the seams of the Green Deal. The energy companies have delayed implementation of the funding framework that will underpin the Green Deal with its core concept of funding environmentally beneficial home improvements through energy bills. The Department of Energy and Climate Change…

With the Green Deal, due to be launched later this year, I thought that an update was in order since I last mentioned it back in March 2011. The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) describe the Green Deal as follows: The Energy Act 2011 includes provisions for the new ‘Green Deal’, which intends…

Update on building progress during July 2011…

A couple of interesting posts on the much neglected forum recently… Justin is a cabinet maker looking to gain experience from a barn conversion – post on his forum topic if you think you may have an opportunity for him. lornapotter is looking for options on how to open up the first floor of barn…

I originally thought that butterflies first made their appearance later in the year than this, associating them more with childhood memories of hot August days than the very start of spring, but apparently March is quite usual. Having spent the winter as a chrysalis, this little blighter was crawling around on the kitchen window yesterday…

As I mentioned in my January building progress update, I’ve been pointing the internal cracks in the mortar of the exposed masonry internal walls. We to put in two openings, one at ground and one at first floor level, from the main room of the barn into the smaller, two storey section that now houses…

Having spent a few hours cutting out tongues (from floorboards nothing more sinister), lifting boards, rummaging around underneath them, padding and separating copper pipes with insulation, rescrewing and renailing, I discovered that in fact the easiest way to quieten down squeaky floorboards was to simply rehammer the heads of the nails that hold the boards…