Our lovely new tenants took possession of the Collier St Barn today, and are busy preparing their new home. It’s always great to see what people can create on the blank canvases we prepare – the imagination of people with furnishings, rugs, pictures and plants always amazes me. We hope they’ll be very happy there for years to come!

Today is, despite the generally-miserable weather, the first day of the meteorological Spring. Spring is a perfect time to move house – the flowers start to bloom, you can have the first barbecue of summer in the new garden, and sunlight streams through the windows into your new living room. This is particularly convenient, as we’re just finishing up our lovely Collier St barn conversion project! Our talented decorator, Trevor, is working there as I write, and the cleaners are booked for next week for the final pre-occupancy clean. Happy Springtime, everyone!

No time for that here at Raspberry Homes! The sites have been busy, with progress towards completion made on our barn conversion in Collier St, and some sterling efforts by the groundworkers are starting to see our Headcorn project take shape. We’ve been working hard to complete some structural works, in partnership with our innovative engineer and ever-patient steelwork manufacturers, and are just starting to see the fruits of everyone’s labour. There’s still a way to go, but at least we’re starting to put things back together after weeks of taking them apart!

The New Year is always a good time to take stock – to look back on the year past, and to look forward to the months ahead. Here at Raspberry Towers we’re doing just that. The final quarter of 2017 was pretty hectic, with a big push to get our beautiful barns completed before the Christmas break. Now they’re done, we’re looking forward to the next one – we’ve got a few pots on the boil, but we’re not sure what will be ready to tell you about soonest! We’ll keep you posted – in the mean time, Happy New Year!

The construction industry traditionally closes completely between Christmas and New Year; the builders’ merchants are closed, the sales calls from suppliers stop, and the tradesmen take a well-earned break with their families. It’s the same at Raspberry Homes – our sites are quiet (which I’m sure our always-patient neighbours are grateful for!) and our subcontractors are at home. For me, as well as time for the family, it’s a time to catch up on paperwork and admin; to do end-of-year filing; VAT returns; and take stock a little of how the old year worked out, and to make some plans for the new. However 2016 was for you, all here at Raspberry Homes wish you a 2017 filled with fun!

The year has gone whooshing by, and it’s almost Christmas again! Over in Headcorn, our newts are safely hibernating in their new logpiles & hibernacula, and in Collier Street we’ve just got the walls up on the barn conversion. The rain has held off (for the most part) so far, but it will come sooner or later and we want to be weathertight when it does. So it’s all go at Raspberry Homes, with the final push on before the traditional holiday break between Christmas and New Year.

The lovely people at Asbestos First came today to make our beautiful barns safe for us to work on. As you can see, they definitely got into the spirit of things!
As well as asbestos removal, the newts have also all been captured and relocated to their new habitat, the engineer calculations were completed last week, and we’re starting to put in the driveway tomorrow. By the end of this month, we should have the driveway in, the new garage (with luxury bat loft!) erected, and be well on the way re-doing the roof and getting the structural work in place. It’s going to be a busy few months!

It’s been a lovely summer, and here at Raspberry Towers we’ve been taking some time off from site while we work on our next exciting project. Our two lovely barns are in an ecologically-sensitive site, and we’ve been working with local ecologist Guy Newman as well as Natural England to make sure we reduce our impact on the habitat as much as possible during the works – and that we leave it in a better state than we found it once completed. We’ve now got all the paperwork and licenses in place, and are carefully relocating the animals to a habitat we prepared earlier. Jo, our lovely engineer, is busy preparing the final calculations, and we should be starting work at the end of this month. Watch this space!

… nearly! Our beautiful cottage in Collier St is finally finished. The cleaners have been, the garden is looking amazing, and as soon as I can get the skip collected from the driveway we’ll take some photos and put it on the market! Have a fantastic Bank Holiday weekend, everyone!

The Collier St project is on the home run now. The decorator’s made a start, the bathrooms are starting to go in, the tiler’s done some tiling. I like this part of the project – the decisions have all been made, and you start to find out whether it all looks as you imagined it, all those months ago! We should be dropping the scaffold next week, and will really be able to make a start on the new cottage garden, which will be the finishing touch this project needs.