Property Maintenance

Maintenance

As any homeowner knows – if you ignore property maintenance trouble soon builds up. With 69 houses and plus commercial properties and farm buildings we have well over 100 properties to maintain on the estate. We do a great deal ourselves with a small team of talented and dedicated staff.

The following is an incomplete list intended to show the variety of tasks we cover:

Building Maintenance: With 69 houses plus numerous other premises such as farm buildings there is an endless stream of work in providing maintenance.
Building Improvements: In addition to ongoing day-to-day maintenance we also carry out improvements such as complete renovation of the internals of properties and even the construction of extensions.
Water Supplies: We supply over 25 homes with water plus many watering troughs on the farms. The pipes occasionally need repairing and we also maintain the UV and particle filters to ensure the water is safe to drink.
Sewage: Nearly 30 properties have septic tank systems which need occasional maintenance.
Land Drainage: We have many miles of field drains and ditches to maintain. Inevitably they fill with leaves and other debris.
Fences and Dry-Stone Dykes: Likewise – there are tens of miles of fences.
Forestry: While we don’t carry out the harvesting in-house we do have to carry out various aspects of tree-surgery and the removal of dangerous limbs or whole trees.
Roads: There are several miles of private roads and tracks which require maintenance.
Snow-clearance: See roads. We have 4 snowploughs and a JCB digger. If we can’t clear the roads with that lot we needn’t bother because no public road will be open locally either.
River-bank maintenance:
Ground-care: Grass-cutting and hedge-trimming. We maintain various lawns and hedges in common usage in the village and there’s a big area of lawn to keep around the castle and about 1/2 mile of hedges.

Management

It goes without saying that properties need to be managed too. With nearly 70 households on the estate plus about 10 commercial tenants there’s much to do. Communications and liaison with tenants is a constant feature of our daily lives and this extends to liaison with community bodies too. In this task we are ably assisted by our factor David Smart and the team from Strutt & Parker.