Building a new house

It has been a difficult year for the world, and we feel lucky to have been able to start our building project. All being well, before too much of 2021 has passed, we will see the post and beam floor in place and walls going up, we will have moved out of our home of 15 years and will be living locally in rented accommodation. We have much to do to achieve all that, so are feeling both excited and slightly apprehensive. In the meantime, a moment of contemplation is in order. Here is Elizabeth looking through (in her mind's eye) the study window. A very happy 2021 to our readers!

A week of significant progress by Pat and his assistants. We visited at lunchtime today, having just paid the Scottish Energy Networks charge for the electricity connection to the house/plot. They are not willing to supply us via a pole, so the job is going to involve closing the 40m section of road to a point near our architect's house, digging it up, and laying an underground cable to the front boundary of the plot, from where Pat will be responsible for the trenching. As this involves much work and 'compensating' the local authority for the inconvenience of creating a diversion (and we will probably have to wait for the half-term holiday in February as it will interfere with access to the primary school), it is not cheap. But, as we have already heard Pat say many times, 'we are where we are'. The site is very muddy, except for the protected area under the big tree, where the team were sitting and enjoying lunch, but the shape of the house (minus the garage, whic...

Yes, cows. The week didn’t start well, though we were very fortunate in the sense that our kind neighbour-to-be took the trouble to message late on Sunday evening to tell us that we had had cows on the plot. The adjacent field had been populated by cattle, at first restrained by an electric fence, but they had broken through and come to investigate our polystyrene panels. I was due at the plot the following morning anyway, so I made an early start and took some fencing materials along. The long-standing gap by the TPO lime is now protected. We made a new friend by giving away, via the local Facebook group, the rigid pond liner which was extracted from the ground during the site clearance. Nice to think that it will have a new life. A little more excavation is taking place, as it has emerged that one of the trenches was dug (and filled with concrete) on the wrong side of the line marking the outline of the lounge. At least we won’t now have a very narrow room (and bedroom above). We hav...