Amid the stresses of moving in, unpacking and snagging it can be easy to temporarily lose sight of why you wanted to chase a more balanced life in the first place. So it has something of a relief to almost immediately get the first glimmers of the promised Good Life.
My top three so far have been – Continue reading
One of the great joys and surprises of The Secret Acre’s eco-makeover has been our bespoke recycled kitchen.
From the outset, Emma has been dead set against buying commercial kitchen units. You regularly hear of people spending tens of thousands of pounds on commercial kitchens which all tend to look frankly so cheap and nasty you wonder why they bother. The answer is of course because we are told having a bespoke kitchen made for you is astronomical. Continue reading
It seems hard to believe, but just over six months into the smallholding’s eco-makeover, the excellent builders had stuck to both the timetable and the budget and we were ready to move in.
So after lots of internal finishing in September, and a disappointing lack of readily available Triple A rated energy efficient appliances, we finally booked the removal van for the start of October, worried only by the alarming amount of stuff we had to pack up.
Now safely in, we are starting to work through the inevitably long list of snagging issues, top of which on day one was the alarmingly absent manhole for the bathroom sewer! Continue reading
I can’t remember if a woodburning stove was on our original list of eco-bling for the smallholding’s eco-makeover, but like the range style cooker, it was simply taken as a given.
Of course no-one does woodburning stove style quite like the Scandinavians, and we quickly decided that only a Morso would do for our relatively contemporary extension.
What proved less easy was interpreting the relatively old installation regulations for a modern extension. Continue reading
Our top tip for moving into a newly refurbished home would definitely be to make sure, preferably before you use your new bathroom, that you have remembered to connect it to the sewer!
So it was, 48 hours before we moved in, that we found ourselves at the smallholder’s hovel casually cleaning, snagging and dreaming where our furniture would go. As we gazed around outside the front door I idly remarked that I couldn’t remember when the trench had gone in to connect the new front bathroom to the original sewer running across the front of the property. Continue reading
Finally just over six months into the smallholding’s eco-makeover, the big day arrived for moving in all our unnecessarily large amount of stuff.
A week of unprofessional packing, cleaning up after the builders and writing out an unfeasibly long snagging list, led to a mere four hours of highly professional stuffing it all into the removal van, a near miraculously quick two hours of unloading and a highly commendable lack of any breakages. Continue reading
It seemed a no-brainer that when buying new appliances for The Secret Acre’s eco-makeover we would of course only choose from the most energy efficient A+++ rated.
So we were genuinely surprised and disappointed to discover that there is a real lack of affordable A+++ appliances available in the UK. Continue reading
The Secret Acre 