Ready for Reclaim

We have a huge interest in reclaimed materials and are blessed with the house and barns that they offer us a plethora in which to choose from. There is a lot of work to do to get the pieces up to scratch, but that's very much part of the whole process with this project. We are interested in celebrating what the buildings were and have been. It was sad that so many of the properties we looked at during our search had been stripped of their past. This was the #1 attraction of Clayhill - so much to celebrate! So much untouched!

We are on the hunt today for a door to replace the old woodstore:

Looking over in the barns we found a few that are able to be reclaimed: 

This is the one that was the ideal fit, so we will be stripping it back and getting it ready to install in the next few weeks:

There are endless possibilities that can be achieved with reclaim. I have lots of inspiration over on my pinterest boards and this is very much the aesthetic we're hoping to achieve over in the barns. We are big fans of Salvage Hunters and recent subscribers of SalvoWeb too. Somerset also has some *fantastic* salvage & reclamation yards. Our favourites locally are: Wells and Glastonbury.

The chicken shed is becoming quite the holding pen (ahem, excuse the pun!) for our finds of late - all of the wood we found left by a local farmer ready to be burnt - Noooooooo! We saved it from the rain and will be spending the sunny days soon knocking all the nails out:

Inspiration for the Garden

We decided a trip out of the house today would be good, so we took a walk down the road to the lovely Walled Gardens of Cannington. It is fantastic to have such an attraction 20 minutes walk from our house! Great for some inspiration for the garden too. The students from Bridgwater College have a series of show gardens that they have designed. We really liked the look of this one:

The use of reclaimed wood is great and very pleasing on the eye. This is definitely the kind of look I think we will be going for once we tackle the garden. Really liked this insect house too - great use of old pallets:

The planting scheme here is interesting, very Mediterranean looking:

And who knew Eucalyptus could grow in the UK?! We bought ourselves a small plant so we'll see how it takes...

There was a lovely greenhouse in the gardens too:

Check out the size of the lemons!!!

 Healthy looking cacti too: 

Even though the gardens weren't at their most floral it was still great to go - we'll be back to check on progress as the year carries on. It is only down the road after all....