Our building team are taking their holidays

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 copper connection would be. Would we be back to the whirring noises of dial-up days, or have the 'luxury' of the 1.5mbps connection achieved at Coed y Mynydd Isaf? We went live on Monday and in the event it's not too bad, averaging 5.5mbps, enough for everyday purposes including BBC iPlayer (still no sign of the promised aerial fitter), even if our grandchildren won't be able to stream many different things simultaneously - probably an advantage.

We don't know how long our builders' foreign holidays are going to last, so there may be a considerable pause before we post again.

we have our first substantial area of paving .....

..... edged with these small granite setts

the area at the back of the house will have to wait, as will the planting

but at the front we have a tidier entrance with some cleverly engineered gradients (and timber cut for the cladding of the inside of the porch)

we had a delivery of a surprising amount of jointing compound for the paving slabs

and in the evenings, we can bring the inside out

and, at last, our router glows with a blue 5.5mbps light




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