A new month and it's busy at the house

For so long (almost 4 years) we have talked of 'going to the plot' but now the language has changed and our visits are to a house - unfinished, of course, but steadily moving forward. We have two joiners on site working on the exterior cladding and with jobs to do indoors if the weather turns. Yesterday the roofing gang returned and made small work of slating the garage and walkway, which now only needs guttering and, in due course, downpipes. Rob the electrician has made a start on his next phase of work, drilling the ceilings for the downlights and, yesterday, installing our first consumer unit in the utility room (the second will be fitted in the garage). And we have a front door now, so the house can be secured and is ready for its heating system when Keith and his team turn up. They were due yesterday, but the key thing is that they come in time for us to apply for the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme which runs out at the end of next month. Meanwhile, the electrical appliances for the kitchen have begun to arrive. We ended up ordering the oven and the dishwasher from the retailer in Denbigh, where they will be kept until we need them, and the cooker hood, microwave and induction hob online (from three different suppliers) and these arrived at our rental house yesterday. It's not possible to claim 0% VAT on these appliances, as it is on all building materials, so there would have been no advantage in asking Pat to order them. We have now paid Pat's seventh invoice. This one, not surprisingly, involved a raised price for the doors and windows over his original quotation. That's to be expected given the general inflation and supply difficulties which have affected building supplies for the last couple of years.

nice to see the front door in place

cables emerging from the ceiling

battens in place on the bay window

interesting grain on the cladding timber

almost there with the bay .....

..... and now we have it

the consumer unit starting to go in

one of many boxes of electrical fittings

it's still very much a building site



the first cladding boards going up on the sitting room to the left

the garage/workshop has its slates and ridge tiles

and a couple of light tubes

looking forward to seeing garage doors




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eighteen months have passed

Image
So it has been a year and a half since the last blog post. Yes, I have become lazy about updates and yes, the last few things have been completed. Well not quite - we still need to have the labels removed from the velux windows, and I need to sort out the building insurance policy, but to all intents and purposes we are there, and have been for the last few months. We had waited a while for Pat to sort out the last few things. The replacement skylight had been leaning against the container tor the best part of a year, the lovely stone walls remained uncapped, and the pedestrian path from the gate to the front door remained unfinished. In the end it took an email following the death of a close contemporary to elicit a response from Pat, and then things happened quickly. He had struggled to find someone whose work he trusted to finish the epoxy gravel path. Sadly we were away when the work was done, but we were very pleased with the result. We were also away when Pat capped Andy's st...
Read more

More trenches - and now they are full

Image
Dan and his assistants have achieved an amazing amount this week, in spite of some unhelpful spells of rain. The excavation work started on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday, with all of the trenching except that for the garage completed. This included digging to below the level of the old septic tank chamber which was at the house end of the garage, and which necessitated a very wide and deep trench across what will be the front of the house. On Thursday morning we received this photo from our rather surprised neighbour-to-be, as a concrete pump big enough to build a skyscraper arrived at 8 o'clock. Over the course of the day, 10 deliveries of concrete went through the pump and into the trenches. Given the tightness of access to the site, the narrow roads through the village and the fact that the deliveries were stacking in order to ensure continuity of supply for the pump, it's amazing that the crew seems to have kept of all our neighbours onside.  We popped by just after lu...
Read more

Gravel, gates, and a working wood-burning stove

Image
Pat had wanted to wait for Andy's completion of the boundary walls to lay the gravel-retaining grids and the crushed stone. With one of their characteristically early starts, the front parking area began to be transformed. The white grids, which have attached landscaping fabric, protect the tree roots and reduce the gravel's tendency to wander by lunchtime we had a new look and with gates in place, a black paint finish preferred to the galvanised look, it just remains for the approach from the road to be tarmaced and the pedestrian path given its resin-bound top layer This week Chris finally arrived to fit the flue which links the woodburner to the chimney lining. It started like this, with lots of boxes of bits,  and finished like this V and at night, with the blinds drawn and the complimentary/complementary carmine Clearview gauntlets, it looks like this: Oh, and I've been at work with the panto-router and a piece of old oak, and we have a house sign: We still haven't...
Read more