About Us
Warren Barn and Burrow Cottage
Pete and Steph bought Warren Barn in 1996. It was a huge risk: the barn and out-buildings were derelict and very close to collapsing. For some reason we thought we could save them. So began our wonderful project to convert the buildings into our home. During the conversion we lived in a Married quarter at RAF Coltishall with our 2 young children and our 2 dogs.
We were very hands on with the conversion doing as much of the work as possible. We had to: in reality we couldn’t afford the project. Terry, our builder was fantastic, he was happy to work with us and put up with our lack of knowledge and to guide us through the various problems that arose during the conversion.
Click on the button below to see some pictures of the project. They are scanned from our photo albums so I apologise for the quality.
We moved into the Barn in September 2001 – it wasn’t finished! We lived (or to be more accurate camped) downstairs. We had run out of money and our plan was to finish it when we could afford it! Subsequently progress has been slow, our children have grown up and left home and the Barn is nearly finished! Click here to see how we did it.
The Southern outbuilding was converted into a holiday cottage in 2014. The name Burrow Cottage was chosen to compliment Warren Barn. Although it would have been possible to divide the upstairs to create 2 bedrooms we decided that a full open plan room would be far nicer and that the building would have been cramped with more than 2 guests.
Initially we advertised the cottage with cottages4u which was a good start but as we gained experience of how to manage a holiday cottage we felt that we could offer a better deal to our guests. We therefore reduced our prices as we did not need to pay the nearly 20% commission of the big holiday cottage companies.
Accordingly, we developed our own website and advertised the cottage on the Independent cottages website www.independantcottages.co .uk. With Independent Cottages we can manage the cottage as we want and still hopefully provide the best value for money to our guests. We enjoy welcoming our guests to Burrow Cottage, each week we get to see our project through someone else’s eyes and moreover we can share this wonderful location.
Pete Birch
Steph Birch
Marlow
Marlow is our Dog: a 8 year old German Short-Haired Pointer. He is a very mellow dog and gets on well with our guests (2 and 4 legged).
Kerry Hill Sheep
We have a small flock of Kerry Hill rare breed sheep. Our sheep live in the field next to the Barn and Burrow Cottage.