and the barn came tumbling down

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Just when you think that progress is slowing down and you are wondering if it will ever be finished, something dramatic happens. Nope, we haven't finished one and moved in, now that would be ridiculously dramatic........instead we have more destruction than construction as the last barn has been demolished. At first it was really exciting to hear that it had come down, and the videos of the JCB pushing and prodding the building really encouraged a Hooray feeling. But when I went to the site in the evening after work, it just looked like a bomb site. It was really quite shocking that instead of a charmingly delapidated building there was an enormous pile of rubble and rafters. It was a very sobering, 'OMG what have we done' sort of visit. You tell yourself that the new building will be made with the same bricks and to the same layout (but just not irrevocably falling down) as before, but it still made me feel sad that we couldn't renovate rather than rebuild. There really is no going back once the building is down. I'm sure I will feel different about it once they start building it back again. To cheer myself up I had a look around barn 2 which is now up to first floor height with the internal walls currently being built, and I have to say it is coming on fantastically well. So not all doom and gloom. 

The following day I popped over in my lunch break and it already looked much better as the site was being tidied up. Mind you, there is now the most enormous pile of bricks to clean. We went over yesterday to clean bricks and managed a good 250 or so, but that barely made a dent in the pile. There are thousands of them.

To find a 'before' photo I went back through each month until I came to a particularly photogenic month last June. That was when we were desperately wishing that some building would start, although still wrangling with the coal mining surveys and structural surveys so not in the slightest worry free. As a reminder here are a few of those lovely picturesque barn photo's.