Building a new house

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...

 It's just over 4 years since I installed the fence which separates our plot from Plas Coch Bach, the neighbouring house to the south, from whose former owners we bought our land. It was a completion condition that that fence be erected within 28 days of purchase, and I remember a beautifully sunny May/June while the job was done. It's documented in some early posts in this blog. We have been waiting a while to have our boundary to the north formally separated from the enormous field which stretches away towards Hendrerwydd and the Clwydian Hills. Today Gethin and his two human helpers, together with his rather amazing fencing machine (which arrived on a trailer towed by a tractor) have done the job. Before eight this morning this was the view through our dining area window as the job started: By builders'-morning-break time, the first two legs of a very dog-leggy fence were in place: We had been told that the job would be completed in a day, and so it proved. While the fen...

So, while we are still emptying boxes, putting up the odd picture and shelf, and generally smiling a lot as we get used to the house, Pat's team are continuing work on the house, both inside and out. Sion the plumber has spent a couple of mornings here, replacing a basin (a tricky job) with a smaller one which suits the opening of a shower door better, silicon sealing any sanitary gap that presented itself, and tuning, yes, tuning the taps, some of which were noisy as our water pressure is quite high. Ian and Dewi have been joinering away painstakingly, and now the rear elevation no longer has building blocks on display. The cladding process is time-consuming, involving the cutting and fixing of battens, the stapling on of a black building paper, and then the cutting and fixing of the larch boards. A lot of thought and arithmetic goes into getting the right look. Some boards have to be ripped to reduce their width, and all have to be 'invisibly' screwed in exactly the right...

Amazing as it seems to us, we are here, sleeping here at night, living here. The decorators did a cracking job, working one of the Jubilee Bank Holidays, and leaving only the varnishing of the staircase to tomorrow, on the basis that the stairs should remain protected for the actual removal process. The removals company, a small family affair we used 16 months ago to move to the rental, also played a blinder and had everything tidily in position here by tea-time on Tuesday, having started at 8.30. And we think we did well, too, meeting our three weeks timetable for packing up all our stuff including the things in the double garage, and succeeding in getting a new mid-sleeper bed and curtains in our bedroom put up here over the weekend instead of going to Jubilee parties. This morning we handed back the keys to the rental property, having done a big clean there on Wednesday. And now we are here, and it is lovely. It's still dusty, and everything outside is still to be done - claddin...