One of the problems with the way that this site has evolved is that I’ve missed some of the fundamental blocks upon which a site like this would normally be built. One of the most obvious of those is that I’ve never really described the barn and the conversion that we’re undertaking.

An email I received a few weeks back (and subsequently lost due to my over zealous spam filter) pointed this out to me and so I’ve attempted to address the gap and update the About page with some further details. It’s been enjoyable and refreshing, reviewing the work and the progress we’ve made over the last four (how many??? time flies) years…

Following on from my original about text I’ve written a high-level description of the conversion, then some vital statistics and finally some before, during and after photographs…

The Conversion
The roof and walls have been structurally untouched by the conversion, although a number of incursions into them have been made. All original openings have been retained with three windows added to the southerly gable end & six roof-lights to allow natural light into the otherwise unlit first floor. The ‘arrow’ / ventilation slits have been glazed. The existing roof kept, albeit with the addition of in-roof vents toward the bottom edge to provide appropriate air-flow. On three sides, the walls have been completely repointed with lime mortar, the fourth side, the southerly facing gable-end has been limewashed.

The floor was dug out and replaced with a new one containing insulation, a radon barrier damp proof course and under-floor heating.

Originally the barn was in two distinct parts. A full height main area, with large through cart doors and a smaller two storied north-end with stables below and a hay-loft above. Ground and first floor openings have been cut through the internal wall to unify the two parts of the building.

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Read the rest here >> About the barn

I must apologise if you’ve emailed me over the last few months. I know of a least one email (asking for some proper vital statistics related to the barn), that has disappeared down the drain hole of my spam filter.

Communications with blog readers has become ever more difficult – the commercialisation of the Akismet spam filter for comments has led to the need to explore other solutions such as the much disliked Captcha I now use – spam email leads to increasingly more draconian email filters. In fact my spam email filters are now so assertive that hardly any email, legitimate or not gets by them and once classified as spam there’s only a short period before the email is deleted entirely from my server. So I’ll tweak things to ensure I’m not losing real messages and be a little more on-the-ball when it comes to email.

Please feel free to email me … mbc at this domain dot com – (you’ll need to make the appropriate substitutions) or click on the envelope icon on the header above … I promise I’ll not ignore you or let my spam filter flush your message.

I’m really rubbish at self promotion and promotion of this blog… one thread of evidence to that statement is that I’ve been on Twitter for a couple of years now, but have neglected to mention it here. I have stuck a Twitter link up on the header but never provided any explanation, so to put the record straight…

I use Twitter to post irregular updates regarding the blog, progress at the barn or just general comments related to barns, conversions or building in general. I’ve made 120 tweets or so over the last couple of years, with most of those made recently as it’s only now that I’m finding Twitter to be a genuinely useful and interesting tool – it would be great if you would follow me…

This blog has taken a bit of a kicking recently from big brother Google who came along with his ‘Panda’ and gave us right going over. (For the uninitiated, Panda is a rolling update to the algorithm Google uses to produce search results that has been creating uproar across the web for most of 2011).

Traffic to the site has halved since the middle of October when the impact of the update began to bite. I find that quite upsetting and discouraging – for me the main reward of running a blog is feeling you’re communicating with your ‘audience’. When that audience is chopped in half then that feels bad.

But I’ll soldier on and try and fix anything that I guess Google doesn’t like… and that’s the real problem. I don’t do anything on this site that’s untoward or underhand. I write all the content myself and run a few Amazon links and Google adverts – so in reality I haven’t got a clue what has led to this downgrade and Google won’t / don’t tell. They provide guidelines and high-level advice but when it comes to specifics – there’s nothing.

I’ll take the opportunity to tidy things up and give the site a facelift. I’ll reread up on what I should be doing and hopefully win back some of my previous visitors. Expect a few changes around here over coming days and weeks…

Things should look a little different already…

The gallery on this site has frankly been a bit of a mess since I messed up my Flickr account and started loading photos locally and also into Picasa.

Now they’re all in one place and accessible through my new gallery page – much neater.

The gallery link in the menu just below the site header will get you there…