Building a new house

We are very excited to have our first key to the house. Not that we need it, as the front door is still under construction, but this week we have gained the other two external doors, one of which is our back/side door, and the other the personnel door to the back of the garage.  complete with temporary handle protection A new joiner (we understand that Ian is on his way back from Covid) started on Monday the laborious task of battening the walls which are to be timber-clad. I should think that by now he is fed-up of 2 x 1s, but he is doing a very tidy job. his job is made a little easier by the enormous mitre saw and stand which are now on the scaffolding while he deals with the upper walls meanwhile, the chimney has been rendered (well all of it except the section above the roofline - wonder who gets that job?) and Pat, we learned, is having an argument with the suppliers of our rooflights as he thinks the waterproofing is inadequate and they may need to be replaced - hence the un...

This  week we have seen the plastering and rendering almost finished, the arrival of the final double glazed unit (so all the windows are now complete), and the promise of progress next week on the timber cladding, with the materials stowed in the garage. We are also looking forward to the imminent arrival of two external doors - the side/back one, and the personnel door for the back of the garage. The front door with its side panel will take longer, and we haven't yet specced the garage doors, while the current idea is to match the wall cladding. In another week we are hoping to see our renewable heating contractor back to fit the air source heat pump, water cylinder etc, and actually get the heating system and the electricity-generating PV system up and running. This is dependent on our electrical contractor also being available, so we are grateful that our builder/main contractor ties all these threads together for us. lots of larch cladding being stored in the garage/workshop i...

We have been operating to the rule that we will only take quick snaps with our phone-cameras when we visit and work is going on. We therefore look forward to our weekend visits, taking a real camera, thinking that we will have the run of the house.  However, it doesn't always work out. It may be a coincidence that we have now discovered Saturday workers (they're not getting overtime, we're sure, because they will be subbed to our main contractor at a fixed price) from the same family - Sion the plumber and his uncle, Melvyn the plasterer. Today he was at work boarding both the sitting room and bedroom 1, saying that this would make Monday more straightforward. This means that the wet plastering will happen when he has his mate with him. We could see that outside the base coat of render has been applied since our last visit to the northern gable ends (back and front) and no doubt, by the time he left today, both the bigger rooms will be ready for start-of-week float coats. O...

We continue to be fortunate with remarkably good weather for January, and work has proceeded well this week. Today we did a bit of house admin and submitted details to the local planning authority regarding the roof and wall materials used to date - this should release us from a planning condition - and only cost £35 (ironic cheers). Further, we visited our chosen electrical appliance supplier in Denbigh with a list of everything needed for our kitchen and utility room. Our hope is that their quotation will match online suppliers so that we can keep the business local and benefit from what friends tell us is their excellent after-sales service. When we got to site we were surprised to find that, as well as busy renderers, we had a half a dozen window fitters installing the picture windows in our bedroom. Well, only two fitters were doing the actual installation, but their companions had helped to lift the heavy double-glazed units into the house and up from the ground floor - bear in m...

A happy new year to any readers! 2022 has started off wet and grey, but perhaps not quite as wet as did 2021. This is where we were with the house exactly a year ago: we had concrete foundations, mud, water, floor beams and insulation blocks for the walls ..... ..... which were very small, but beautiful in their own way Now the structure is complete, though we await the slating of the garage/workshop, with this next image taken from a similar place to the top photograph (trees and beech hedge for reference): Progress is now counted in the amount of plastering that has been completed - just about all but the two biggest rooms and the hallway is finished. Before we had the week away with our children and their families in Devon over the New Year, we did a little beech hedge-trimming near to one of the smaller windows in the sitting room. We will probably also in due course take down the smaller of the two trees which have been allowed to grow out of the hedge. it's still difficult to...