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

Christmas affords me sometime to be able to read, eat and drink. Cookery books allow all three, albeit two of them in the abstract unless augmented. Rick Stein is a favourite and I loved this quote from his latest book ‘Spain’. It conveys a sense of home and belonging that most of us seek. Towards…

With plans in place, some success under my belt and a enthusiasm for cutting wood(!) I recently started work on a cabin bed for the second bedroom in the barn. The cabin bed build was a part of a larger project that included boxing-in the large thermal water store and all the associated pipe work,…

According to an article in today’s Telegraph a cross party group of MP’s has been pretty critical of the National Planning Policy Framework, commenting amongst other things that it is “unhelpfully vague” and a “lawyer’s charter”. The Local Government Committee go on to make the following recommendations: * Scrapping a clause where developers are given…

When designing a layout it’s easy to forget to plan for storage…

Laying bare the basics of my floor structure through an annotated diagram that a layman like me can better understand, the aim of this post is to answer the question…what are the component parts of a floor? The diagram is based on the floor of the barn to the best of my recollection (it’s been…

Update on building progress during July 2011…

My wife has been hankering for some solid oak beam lamp stands for around the barn. You can get them from quite a few places across the ‘net, but the cost of delivery is usually quite prohibative due to the weight and size of them. As I was tidying the garage the other week I…

Here’s and old friend that I don’t see as much as I’d like… From Barn Conversion 2011 …and we probably need to start seeing more of if we’re to get ourselves out of this mess…

So with the ability to build shelves firmly under my wing (or rather under my stairs) I started on my second carpentry challenge, to – Box in the thermal store and build a cabin bed in the second bedroom. Basically, to enclose everything on the other side of the internal door shown on this photograph……

I thought I’d make my own fireworks this year… From Barn Conversion 2011

I’ve been dabbling with Google Sketchup recently. Sketchup is according to the blurb “3D sketching software for the conceptual phases of design” or as rather more grandly proclaimed by McCall & Associates “SketchUp is the finest (and most innovative) tool available for anyone designing anything from coffee pots to skyscrapers.” I’ve wanted to produce a…

My first proper foray into DIY carpentry at the barn has been constructing a shelving unit to sit under the stairs. The shelves are required to provide storage, box in the under-stairs area and muffle the sound from the under-floor heating pumps. The timber I chose was basic off-the-shelf stuff from B&Q – planed smoothed…