Building a new house

This has been a week of more slabbing, cobbling and jointing; then trench-digging, concreting and  wall-building. There has also been a good deal of soil-levelling, crushed-stone-spreading and wacker-plating. Pat came back from holiday on Wednesday and seemed to approve of what his team had achieved. almost incidentally, the cladding of the inside of the porch was finished jointing compound was used to grout the stone and cobbles at the front ..... ..... and at the side (fallen chair shows we have the occasional windy day) slabbing continued across the back of the house and soon we had a foundation strip of concrete ..... ..... and then a retaining wall with some nicely graded soil ready for planting

Well, Steph may have been to Greece for his holiday, but he was only away for a week, and returned to our two-day record-breaking heatwave when, on Monday and Tuesday, it was not possible to lay slabs as the mortar would have gone off too quickly. So a little cobbling was done on Monday, together with more marking out with Pat (who has now gone with his family to Cyprus) and Tuesday was a day off. We had 37 degrees of heat and established that a house that has been built to be well insulated to keep the heat in in winter will also largely keep the heat out in summer if you keep the doors and windows shut. We have the summer advantage that there is very little glass on the south elevation as our views are to the north. Wednesday brought the flaggers out in force, and Dewi the joiner turned up to continue the cladding of the front porch. We went out for an hour in the afternoon and returned just as a Gon Granite left - they had taken the initiative to come into the unlocked house to fit ...

On the construction front, this has been the least active week for a long time. Members of the building team are, or are about to be, on holiday in foreign climes: Greece and Cyprus seem to be the destinations of choice. We were treated to the completion of the paving by the front door before they went, Pat having said how much he knew it was inconvenient to be walking inside from hardcore, as that was what had happened at his own house for three years. Last week we did have a further visit from a number of Openreach engineers, building on what Thomas and his mate had done earlier. We were told that it wasn't possible to connect us to the pole which has the last high-speed fibre connections in the village: we have to be connected to our nearest pole which is at the very edge of the village and serves just two properties. As it stands, fibre will reach this pole some time in the next ten years. We waited a further week for our BT contract to start, not knowing quite how slow our cop...