Coombe Barn, Wembury, Devon

A lot has happened since 2014! Yes, 10 years have passed.

As some of you will know, the main barn has two mezzanine floors looking down into the vaulted ceiling kitchen. One is designated a lounge and the other a snug, study or office.  However, the final use has not yet been decided, so we will put a log burner stove in each.

You may remember, as we excavated, the mountains grew. 

At the back of the barns is a track.  so we decided to use the rubble to widen this track.  This is how it used to look:

The objective is to use gabion baskets to hold a facing of good stone backed up by rubble.  We needed to create a small track down to the bottom.

These sketches give a rough before and after.

In December, after 3 weeks of feeling awful on antibiotics and a period of physio getting my leg back together, I returned to the barn to start on the tractor.

Gradually we excavated the floor of the barn. We needed to go 500mm below the existing bottom of the barn.

Notice the sky!

So we decided that to move the rubble more efficiently we needed a tractor with a front bucket – only a small one (tractor).

Yes, it was too hard with the hydraulic breaker so we rented a second digger with a pecker, broke up the concrete and then there were two of us:

Yes, breaking concrete is hard so we decided to survey to find out how much we needed to remove.

The time has come to start on the Milking Parlour (bedrooms) and there’s about 120 tonnes of concrete to remove: 2m x 15m x 1m deep x 2 sides = 60m2 @ 2 tonnes per m3 = 120 tonnes!  That’s a lot!  After 3 days I hardly touched the surface.