Building a new house

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...

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...

After just over 7 weeks of continuous Monday to Friday working from first thing in the morning to the end of daylight in all weathers, Andy has completed our boundary walls, examples, we think, of masonry magic. We now await Pat and his team fitting the capping stones and the gates, followed by laying the retaining crates and gravel on the drive, with a layer of tarmadam across the entrance shared with our neighbours to finish it off. Andy works to Pat's aesthetic of 'sharp'. It has continually amazed us that his day starts with something like this: and, after hours of hammer-on-bolster-chisel tapping and a mix of a dry mortar, he turns it into something like this: The pedestrian path will in time have a coating of resin-bound gravel and there will be a tiny triangular flowerbed inside the gate. The outer bed (a planning stipulation limited the height of the boundary wall to aid the sightline for traffic approaching the village) will be an extension to our garden. The unuse...

The forecast for last Friday was pretty poor, with named storm Babette threatening much of the country with flooding. It's important to put the relatively minor problems it brought to us into perspective: elsewhere in the UK a handful of people lost their lives in flooding incidents, and very many lost possessions and the use of their homes for months ahead. We woke early to the sound of rain drumming on the skylights, and outside Andy the stonemason arrived as daylight broke, quickly assessed the situation, and within 5 minutes left. I then discovered that in the dining area our apples and oranges were floating in the fruit bowl, with water dripping from the ceiling around a light fitting onto the dining room table, something that years ago happened to the same table in our Heaton Moor home when a tap washer failed in the bathroom above. Having searched out buckets and pans, and dropped the light fitting to provide an easy route for the water, I had to find some rectangular contai...

It's 6 months since my last post, and 16 months since we moved in. We always knew that we would have to wait a while for things like the stone boundary walls and the woodburning stove - a combination of waiting for much-in-demand craftspeople and supply delays. Now we have a few things happening again. We have gates - galvanised steel gates made locally and, in the case of the ones at the front of the house, hung on posts which will be enclosed by stone boundary walls. Closure fixings for the side gates are still to be fitted. We also have our woodburning stove, though it is still awaiting installation. We know that our underfloor heating is so efficient that we will probably never actually need to use the woodburner, but it will be there for occasional entertainment, as an additional focal point in the room and as possible back-up in case of a long power-cut. One concern we had last winter on the few days when the external temperature dropped significantly below zero was for the ...

At least a couple of years before we left the old house up the hill, I bought from a friend a 'new, other' greenhouse, in other words a collection of aluminium extrusions and pieces of glass which had never been assembled but which were not in their original packaging. I was assured that everything was present, and my checks suggested that the assurance was well based. When we left the house up the hill, the aluminium and glass went to our hired shipping container at a local garage and emerged a few weeks ago to experience further hazardous transportation to this new place. Following our return from our very pleasant campervan trip to Spain, it was time to try to put it up. At first I worked without instructions, as I couldn't find any markings to tell me the make or model. Drawing on my Meccano-dominated childhood experience, I managed to get most of the aluminium structure together before finding a faint label on a pack of glass, enabling me to exploit the wonders of the ...