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Hey Reader,

Do you ever look around you and think

My god what have I done?

Did that this morning as I stood in the early sunshine with my cup of tea.

I’d just walked down the stairs, under the tarpaulin, and out through the gaping hole in the back of the house where the shower room and kitchen used to be.

Over the past week, our builders have shifted 1,200 tonnes of earth and reshaped the path in our woodland with it, saving us about £15,000 because I discovered this week that it’s not the digging that’s expensive, it’s removing the stuff you dig. We’re lucky enough to have plenty of land that isn’t suffering from more soil being added.

Now we’re demolishing the old lean-to additions to the original 1650s cottage.

By Friday evening the concrete will have been poured for the foundations.

After nearly 10 years of waiting and hoping and saving and planning, we’re finally creating the space we want.

And making so many absolutely batshit discoveries. Like, the sparky told us yesterday that he’s “never seen anything quite like this” and we’re very lucky we’ve not had a fire. We knew we were inheriting alarming electrics, but we feel pretty fortunate right now. There’s dozens of metres of cable that did who knows what.

Yesterday I walked out to find water gushing from about 7 feet up as we found a live pipe. And then again later when the digger found the random network of pipes that’s been laid over the years. We knew it was chaos down there, just not how the chaos worked. We’re learning.

And, best of all, I got to use the dinosaur tooth on the digger to knock down a wall which was SUPER FUN. I want to be a builder now.

As for me, I plumbed in our sink into our temporary kitchen, fixed a couple of leaks, and tried to organise our stuff. Today we have an air fryer arriving, and a new freestanding stainless steel sink because the old sink unit is rotten and nasty and we decided it needed to die. So into the skip it’ll go.

I do not know how I feel about all this.

Excited, yes. But also scared. And wondering if we’re doing the right thing here. I think we are, but you never know. It’s such a HUGE change and impact on such an old cottage. We’re trying so hard to look after the original fabric of the building and create something sympathetic, and reusing all the old stone, but still you wonder.

We’re caretakers of this building and land, despite our names on the mortgage, and we feel a responsibility to look after it for those who come after us.

It’s part of our shared history.

Like books.

Like stories.

It’s humanity’s memoir — this little slice of a handful of lives in an infinite universe in which our lives mean both nothing and everything there is.

If you’d like to follow our progress, we have an Instagram channel here and a YouTube channel here and my newsletter is here.

We’d love to have you. Please share it with everyone you know because I’m determined to make this project pay for itself in sponsorship!

TTFN,

Vicky 🫡

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