The forge is waking up again

This is a day I've been looking forward to for a long time. Work has finally started on the forge itself, the hearth end of the old forge building where DJ worked and the part that gives Davey John's Forge its name. Today the crew knocked out a new door opening and cleared the old window reveals so we can take proper measurements for what will be two new windows and a set of double doors.

It's a working site right now, no question about that. There's rubble on the floor, wheelbarrows everywhere, and a digger arriving tomorrow to dig out the old floor entirely. But even in this state, the bones of the place are remarkable. The stone hearth and chimney arch are solid, and the old ironwork machinery is still fixed to the back wall where DJ left it.

Today's job was knocking out the new door opening and getting the window reveals cleared so we can measure up properly. Once the digger has been in tomorrow and the old floor is out, we'll be laying a new one from scratch, and then the real work begins: cleaning back the walls, pointing the stonework, and getting the old furnace area ready for the new stove that's going in there.

The plan is to keep as much of the original fabric as we can. The stone walls, the hearth structure, the roof trusses — they've lasted this long and they'll last a good while longer once they're properly looked after. We're building around what DJ left behind, not over it.

Walking around inside before the digger arrives, I took a moment to look through the existing window openings. One looks out over fields and open sky toward the hills; another looks out toward the yard where the rest of the site sits. Once the new windows are in and glazed, these will be proper views again rather than just gaps in the stonework.

There's something about standing inside a building like this and seeing daylight come through a window that's been there for generations. We'll be keeping those proportions. The new windows will sit in the same openings.

Clearing a floor like this is proper graft. Two of the crew worked through the day moving rubble, with wheelbarrows going back and forth and shovels scraping down to the old earth beneath. Once the digger finishes tomorrow and the new concrete floor goes in, the space will feel completely different — bigger, cleaner, and ready for the next phase.

It was good to see the place getting cleared out properly for the first time in a long while. Every barrow-load out the door brings it a step closer to what it's going to become.

The old furnace area at the back of the forge is where the new stove will go. The stone hearth block is in solid enough shape that it can be worked around, and the chimney arch above it is intact. Once the walls are cleaned back and pointed and the stove is in, that whole end of the building will be the heart of the room again, which feels right.

We haven't finalised every detail yet, but the direction is clear: a space that honours what was here, made properly useful for what comes next.