Farmer on the ground

One thought recently is about the size or scale at which I’m operating. I wouldn’t say it’s full blown regret it’s more of an acknowledgement this is a big project to take on. I have a four bedroom house, a double garage, a front and a back garden. The amount of time this amount of space consumes is considerable. The garden, for example, requires some maintenance every week. I am absolutely not complaining about it, as I said, it’s more of a recognition I have signed up for something that doesn’t just take money but also time and care to look after properly. I can see why some people don’t maintain their homes very well because it takes constant effort and you want to be doing other things. You want to be travelling, going out, spending time with friends etcetera, instead of grabbing your gloves, going out to the back garden to pull out some of the weeds.

I’ve had the heating system delivered. It is sitting, at the moment, in my garage and that’s created some interesting challenges. For example, the main heat pump weighs 122 kilos.  More than I can move safely on my own. It is enough that moving it up onto the wall of the house is going to be fun and will probably mean I’ll need to hire a professional team to do it. I cannot afford to damage it, or myself!

This is how work accumulates. I need a ladder so I can get up the side of the house. I was outside surveying the exterior of the house when I noticed there are lots of hooks and nails and screws in the wall of the house. And so there is a new task on my list to go across the outside of the house and remove anything I don’t want. I also spotted a TV aerial and a satellite dish, both of which are completely redundant and can go. There are some cables and wires running over the house too. Each of which needs to be traced, identified and, if safe, removed.

Of course, I’ve got my Starlink receiver which at the moment is still sat on top of the garage. This also deserves a permanent home as it’s going to be here for at least 10 more months and perhaps longer.

These are all just adjustments. Where before I lived in a serviced flat and there was very little to do beyond keeping it clean and tidy, now I live in a property where I’m the person responsible for maintenance so the windows get dirty until I arrange for them to be cleaned or I clean them myself. Thinking of it, this is another of the other jobs I’ve got to finish. I have started wiping down the upvc frames at the front of the house.

Kent gets quite a lot of rain and in the shade the upvc frames of my double glazing attract a sort of slow-growing green mould. It wipes of readily enough, but I do need to periodically wipe it off and so I need to go out and wipe it off of the upvc frames on the first floor. I’ve done most of the ground floor but really I should get a ladder and do the first floor windows as well.

Sitting here writing this the thing which led me to think about talking about this is the sheer volume of learning and research I think I need to do. Consider any individual task, such as “How am I going to mount the air source heat pump”? To even consider a consideration you must first know it is a consideration. So working out how to mount it means know how much it weighs, what services are available, whether anyone needs to be notified, what the building code says about how it is mounted, where to buy a suitable mount from and so on.

I understand the pipes from the ASHP run first to the buffer tank. That’s the first thing they connect to, so where I put the ASHP needs to correlate to some degree with the buffer tank. Which means working out where that needs to go and what else I need to consider in placing it.

This is the sort of thing that I’m thinking about at the moment. How am I going to collect all of this information and, knowing myself, probably write most or perhaps all of it down somewhere.

AI tools, which are brilliant and very useful, have been helping here, though I find it can be difficult to then maintain my own sense of the information collected and how it’s organised. If I had made a spreadsheet and was busy researching things and tapping it into the spreadsheet then I would have unconsciously maintained my own version of what is in there. What information I’ve collected, how the links work, how it’s structured and so on. All of which becomes a bit of a mystery when an AI tool does it for you. I’m still learning where to delegate effort and where I should not, so I can stay in touch with the information and the plan built on it.