Dordogne Retreat - a farmhouse tale

While I was busy plastering around the newly fitted window Paul started stripping more of the ivy off one of the remaining barn walls. This is not a straightforward task as the ivy has been establishing itself for many many years and it would be easy to pull chunks of the wall down. The wall is almost 3 metres high at the end so you are also working on a ladder while trying to cut and hack the ivy back.

Paul did a great job but the top of the wall was just earth so we removed that and laid a layer of cement along the top to protect it for the next couple of years before the full restoration gets underway.

There are 2 walls of an old barn left standing by the entrance drive to the house and earlier this year I started hacking back the ivy to expose the stonework. The plan is that these two walls will form the basis of a triple garage/workshop. Plans are only in the embryonic stage but need to be firmed up in the next year or so as the current workshop is in what will be the master bedroom and I need somewhere to move it to!

With the installation of the new underground electrical supply one of the junction boxes was put at the end of the shorter wall and they actually removed about 60cms of wall to install it! So we will rebuild the wall to include the box in its construction.

With the box installed I removed some ivy and found the wall was in a poor state and it was easy to remove stones so in order to stabilise it I rebuilt part of it and patched other areas with mortar to allow us time before rebuilding it properly.

The wall will be rebuilt to about half way through the pile of blocks (put there to protect the box against delivery trucks etc) and built up to about 2.5metres in line with the rest of the wall.