Building a new house

We have just got back from a very enjoyable 4-part trip to France, first watching our oldest grandson compete for England U18s in a Touch Rugby tournament in Vichy, then joining younger son and his family staying in the Ardeche, then visiting friends in Les Baux de Provence and lastly trying to make the long drive home enjoyable by spending a couple of days in Alsace. While we've been away the team have completed the stone flagging down the side of the house. What now remains is to finish the large area in front of the house which will be a combination of a resin-bonded path and loose gravel. We assume this will have to wait until the front stone walls are built. Rob the electrician has also been busy, fitting external lights and power points, including the two 16A circuits to the front and back gardens which are fitted with waterproof, campsite-style sockets. We will use these variously for outdoor equipment, greenhouse power, etc. He has also fitted the front porch lights which u...

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...

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...