Nothing woolly to report this week; the builders dug out loads of soil from the barn and piled in up in front. This is making the place into a mud bath – we can’t go anywhere without traipsing mud after us.

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johnby bank house plus barn

We have finally started the building work on the barn. We had great plans to extend our house into the attached barn, however as you can see from this picture the barn is nearly as big as the house. We couldn’t afford to do the whole thing, so we have had to reduce our plans and only work on 2/3 of it. We loose Cecilia’s workshop and display area, but we keep the extra bedrooms /bathroom/ living room. The living room will become Cecilia’s workroom when we don’t need it for entertaining. The remaining space in the barn will be used for our log store to feed our highly efficient log boiler that is going to heat the house. Read the rest of this entry »

Stanley the billy goat came to visit:

stanley the scary billy goat

As you can see his horns were rather wide, which meant you often got swiped on the back of your legs as he went past snowplough fashion.

His raison d’être was to play mummies and daddies with our goats. He did the deed with Katia no problem, in fact they had a rather love filled weekend. The energy he would normally put into a flock got lavished on our Katia! However the other goat was scared out of her skin by him; first night she refused to share their house and wouldn’t go to bed. When she was in season she would bleat and bleat for mr right, but as soon as Stanley got close she ran off. I guess being hand reared she’s confused about what a true billy goat looks like! So it looks like we will have some kid angoras next may, but nothing from Goat! so no goats milk for us.