Major upheaval at 290-year-old farm on the M62 - Jo Thorp

The parking place between the buildings will have a welfare cabin instead of our tractor and our home will be full of noise, dust and men in hi-viz and hard hats. A great pile of flattened cardboard boxes lay stacked against our kitchen cupboards waiting for all our worldly possessions to be stored in them. I hadn’t realised it was going to be quite such an upheaval and was even less ready for the suggestion of us all moving out whilst the works were carried out. We’d been hoping that the work to be done would be on a room by room basis but unfortunately that isn’t the case. It’s amazing how much stuff you accumulate over the years and I have no idea where we are going to put everything. Our days are busy preparing the sheep for market and getting the sheds ready for the cows coming home. Plans of sorting through everything in the house in the evenings are never accomplished as we usually fall asleep in front of a roaring log burner before a single item is packed away. Every cupboard I open is crammed with old toys, long since outgrown and forgotten, piles of Classic tractor magazines and ancient land maps. The house isn’t small, there’s more than enough room for the three of us and Boo, yet we always seem to be tripping over “stuff”. No matter how many trips to the charity shop or tip we make, how many bonfires we have, there’s still clutter in every room. However, all that is about to change as we make a concerted effort to have a thorough sort out. New windows will soon replace the old rotting wooden ones, damp proofing to some of the rooms will hopefully put an end to any mould appearing and the old horse hair plaster walls will be gone. Sadly my little garden will be no more as it will be dug out and pulled away from the house to try and remedy the damp issues. The timing is not ideal. Summer has long gone and the endless onslaught of rain and wind has begun, making life pretty difficult up here. The storms have begun to sweep across Moss moor bringing torrential rain and gales from the west. I predict the welfare cabin will be occupied more often than not as the workers take shelter from what can be pretty grim conditions! I’ve no idea how long it will all take, but with most projects I expect it will be significantly longer than planned. Unfortunately the new exterior paint job will now be delayed until the spring, but as the house is fast approaching its two hundred and ninetieth year it can be forgiven for looking a bit tatty around the edges. Following a conversation I overhead at a show where someone told his audience that the farm is “derelict and long since abandoned “ we can now concentrate our efforts on making our farm look more pretty and less time on the essentials like tending to our stock.