Building a new house

This is the 99th post in this blog, so it's perhaps appropriate that, before we reach our ton, there should be a brief pause. Our visit today was the first for a long time which, during working hours, found no one on site. Pat had told us on Monday that he needed some time without all the various tradesmen's vans parked at the front, in order to deal with an issue which, ironically, has arisen with our water supply. Our celebration of H2O finally reaching us, evidenced by the meter cover in the repaired roadway: has had to be tempered by the discovery that we have a leak in the pipe laid a long time ago from the edge of our front garden to the garage, where the supply enters the house. At the moment we have a couple of exploratory holes in the hardcore: this is where the leak showed, at the front of the garage but this may be where the fault is, in a coupling closer to the house but it looks very much as if machinery is going to have to return to facilitate a repair. In a way t...

Loyal readers of this blog (we know who you are) will be aware of the fact that our relationship with Dwr Cymru Welsh Water has been tense from the very start. At the beginning of our project they seemed determined to make it hard for us to connect into the pubic sewer, though it is a small number of yards away from our land, and are holding a £1,000 deposit until we can demonstrate that the connection works satisfactorily - the mind boggles. A year ago almost exactly we paid them over £2,000 for a connection to the water supply which runs under the public road at the front of our land. Our builder applied for the earliest possible connection. Our many sub-contractors have managed to work on our house only with the help of our kind neighbours, who have supplied water from their outside tap for everything from mortar-mixing to kettle refills. Yesterday our connection was installed by one of DCWW's sub-contractors. The road is to be closed for two or three days, which will sadly inco...

It has been very evident during the last week that we have reached the point where the various tradesmen are having to work in a cleverly integrated fashion - the plumber needs the joiner to do some boxing-in, the tiler needs both of them to do their job before the tiles can go on, and the electrician needs to pop in from time to time to fit some wiring, an appliance, or a switch. We are so glad that we have a builder who is good at co-ordinating all this, and a team of people who are used to working together and sympathetic to each other's needs. Meanwhile we have been at work on the admin side, which has involved dealing with a lot of abbreviations specific to the building industry. Eighteen months ago we committed ourselves to an eco-friendly heating system, encouraged by the promise of support from a government scheme which we knew would end on 31 March 2022. Our builder and heating subcontractor believed that we could make the deadline, and the installation work was duly compl...

We now have two joiners working flat out, and our two tile layers are back as of this afternoon. The wooden floor upstairs is now complete and invisible under protective sheeting, and internal doors are being fixed in place. The sitting room has been completely cleared so that the floor tiling can be completed, and we await the arrival of tiles for the bathroom walls. Bedroom 1 has become the woodworking shop, and the kitchen and utility room are full of kitchen units and electrical appliances which have gathered there in the last few days. We have had a couple of mornings of 6.30 pings on my phone warning me of impending deliveries - not so straightforward when you are actually living 30 minutes away from the delivery address. Possibly best of all, we at last have an indication (via Denbighshire County Council's online road closures list) that our water supply should be connected during the last week of this month. At that point the domestic hot water system can be commissioned an...