Okay, not all. But we've had some serious works going on here since Christmas. Thought you might like to see some photos.

Underpinning the library partition wall

We discovered the old foundations under the substantial stone and block wall which divides the library from the chapel were only about 20cm deep and laid on 'made up ground' AKA damp clay. No wonder we had a subsidence problem!

Much digging and tonnes of concrete later, the collapse has been halted and the cracks in the stonework repaired. You can see from where the builder's head is that they dug down a good six feet.

I'm glad to say when they got down there we could see how much better founded the main walls of the chapel as a whole are. They've settled a bit over 73 years, of course, but nothing like as badly as the partition which was added to form the library in the 1970s.

Donations towards this work are still welcome – our thanks particularly to Tony Lockhart, whose parents originally prompted the creation of the library and who has kindly given £5,000.

New Windows (photo coming soon)

We took the opportunity, while all the furniture and books were moved out, to replace decrepit old windows in the library. The increased visibility really 'lifts' this room, also thanks to Tony Lockhart's gift.

Three rectangular windows, now without their rusting glazing bars and their rather milky secondary double glazing, give a beautiful view towards the Lodge and our largest surviving macrocarpa (Montery Cypress) tree. They're all properly double glazed now, of course.

As for this gothic arched window in the south wall, it was clearly built originally to be a door – even though it opens quite some feet above ground level. How so? The historical reason for this is probably the longer term plans of Adela Curtis (who founded the first community on this site).

She dreamed of a growing body of community members living or retreating/studying on site. To house some of these she planned small 'cells' within a cloister-like building completing three sides of a square, stepped down the hillside with the chapel wall as the fourth, highest side.

The coming of the Second World War probably put paid to those plans, as to much else for her Community of Christian Contemplatives.

Kitchen facelift

The Environmental Health Officer told us we had to make our kitchen more effectively cleanable. Most of us can get irked with health and safety measures when they go over the top. But this work has certainly given us some real advantages without - I hope you agree – compromising the sense of a kitchen which is both businesslike and communal.

The result you see is a new non-slip floor, shiny new wall cladding, and half the ceiling has been rebuilt too. In the process of doing that, we decided to renew some of the kitchen units and most of the worktops.

All this – bar the flooring – was done using in-house skills, with some crucial help from Mart Tebbs and our friendly local carpenter Gerrard Robertshaw.

The project was planned and run (with immense dedication and attention to detail) by Mark Tocknell just before he left the core.

Sunpower Ahoy

I've gone on about this project with some regularity. Here at last is the outcome. We're now generating electricity all day – a little when it's cloudy and up to 6.5kW when the sun shines in full summer.

You can see the chapel roof covered with photovoltaic panels and the little weather station near the apex. This allows anyone to go online and check not only how much electricity we're generating, but also what the weather's like down here. You're presented with a 'dashboard' of meters, some with mini-icons which swap the meter for a graph of recent performance.

To try it out, just click on this link. We'll shortly be adding the dashboard as a permanent feature of this website.

New House

Finally, the new warden's residence is taking shape. It will have three bedrooms, against the day when a future warden may have a family. The outside skin of the walls is stone recycled from right here on our grounds.

The old bungalow was called Littleness – this was the word Miss Curtis used to mean 'simplicity'. The place was little, but it was named after a concept really. What to call its rather larger replacement? Well, the best idea so far is Largesse – meaning generosity, also an important concept in community living (or any living, actually)... and providing a wry smile for anyone who knew the dimensions of the previous building.