Building a new house

Over the last few days we have noticed that the maize crop has been disappearing from a lot of the fields in the vicinity, and this morning I had an inkling that today could be our day. So in the early morning light I took a couple of snaps to remind us of how enclosed part of our garden had become over the summer. And then, late this afternoon, we heard the noise of machinery in the field, and a glance from our upstairs window revealed three tractor/trailer combinations, together with the cutting machine, badged as the Forage Cruiser, at the gate to the Hendrerwydd lane. We admit to considerable apprehension as the beast approached our fence, but we need not have feared. Expertly driven, it took a swathe of corn, including the line of plants which had grown immediately next to the fence. No damage to the fence! The driver was equally careful in removing the crop to either side of our projecting garden: In a first for this blog, here is a little clip of the beast on the move: Soon, the...

We are getting very used to living here now, and are enjoying doing so very much. Not everything is finished (when is a house ever 'finished'?)  and we have a race against time with the Building Control Regulations, but our builder's concentration is obviously on other jobs at the moment. I have put bathroom cupboards up in Man Utd, Man City and Celtic (deep breath needed when drilling through the tiles); and built and painted curved shelves to fit in the cloaks cupboard and, hopefully, solve all of our shoe storage issues. Pat came briefly ten days ago and marked out the rough position of the path from the gate to the front porch. This will be resin-bound, whereas the rest of the front area will be loose gravel. Nothing further to report yet, though. We had a delivery of 'railway sleepers' with which I will build a couple of raised beds for veg and fruit production. No need to go the gym having moved them from the front boundary. I used a couple of hundred metres o...

We have just got back from a very enjoyable 4-part trip to France, first watching our oldest grandson compete for England U18s in a Touch Rugby tournament in Vichy, then joining younger son and his family staying in the Ardeche, then visiting friends in Les Baux de Provence and lastly trying to make the long drive home enjoyable by spending a couple of days in Alsace. While we've been away the team have completed the stone flagging down the side of the house. What now remains is to finish the large area in front of the house which will be a combination of a resin-bonded path and loose gravel. We assume this will have to wait until the front stone walls are built. Rob the electrician has also been busy, fitting external lights and power points, including the two 16A circuits to the front and back gardens which are fitted with waterproof, campsite-style sockets. We will use these variously for outdoor equipment, greenhouse power, etc. He has also fitted the front porch lights which u...

This has been a week of more slabbing, cobbling and jointing; then trench-digging, concreting and  wall-building. There has also been a good deal of soil-levelling, crushed-stone-spreading and wacker-plating. Pat came back from holiday on Wednesday and seemed to approve of what his team had achieved. almost incidentally, the cladding of the inside of the porch was finished jointing compound was used to grout the stone and cobbles at the front ..... ..... and at the side (fallen chair shows we have the occasional windy day) slabbing continued across the back of the house and soon we had a foundation strip of concrete ..... ..... and then a retaining wall with some nicely graded soil ready for planting

Well, Steph may have been to Greece for his holiday, but he was only away for a week, and returned to our two-day record-breaking heatwave when, on Monday and Tuesday, it was not possible to lay slabs as the mortar would have gone off too quickly. So a little cobbling was done on Monday, together with more marking out with Pat (who has now gone with his family to Cyprus) and Tuesday was a day off. We had 37 degrees of heat and established that a house that has been built to be well insulated to keep the heat in in winter will also largely keep the heat out in summer if you keep the doors and windows shut. We have the summer advantage that there is very little glass on the south elevation as our views are to the north. Wednesday brought the flaggers out in force, and Dewi the joiner turned up to continue the cladding of the front porch. We went out for an hour in the afternoon and returned just as a Gon Granite left - they had taken the initiative to come into the unlocked house to fit ...

On the construction front, this has been the least active week for a long time. Members of the building team are, or are about to be, on holiday in foreign climes: Greece and Cyprus seem to be the destinations of choice. We were treated to the completion of the paving by the front door before they went, Pat having said how much he knew it was inconvenient to be walking inside from hardcore, as that was what had happened at his own house for three years. Last week we did have a further visit from a number of Openreach engineers, building on what Thomas and his mate had done earlier. We were told that it wasn't possible to connect us to the pole which has the last high-speed fibre connections in the village: we have to be connected to our nearest pole which is at the very edge of the village and serves just two properties. As it stands, fibre will reach this pole some time in the next ten years. We waited a further week for our BT contract to start, not knowing quite how slow our cop...

The dividing of Openreach from BT may have helped people who want to have their telecoms provided by other than BT, but it hasn't helped us. We had BT broadband in our rental property, enjoying a download speed some 8 times faster than we had been able to achieve at Coed y Mynydd Isaf -and that had necessitated a microwave system beamed from Halkyn mountain and largely paid for by a Welsh Government subsidy. We should have been more suspicious when Elizabeth made her first call to BT to ask them to provide service here in Gellifor. In spite of the fact that she explained that the house is a new-build and had no physical connection to their network, she was assured that her contract would continue and that service would be transferred the day after we moved in. Fat chance. The day came and went, and no engineers attended. Further long telephone calls established that we had been wrongly advised. It would be necessary to cancel our contract, arrange for Openreach engineers to install...