We’re getting plastered! After a couple of let-downs, we’ve got a couple of guys called Rob and Mick who are making great progress on our house (at last). The photo shows the living room with the plaster drying nicely. Perhaps it’s just a bit boring to watch plaster dry (even more boring to take a picture of it), but it means a lot to us.



A close up of the French windows, looking much better than they did before.



This is the en-suite shower and towel rail in the loft conversion. Just waiting for a bit of plaster here and there, and then we can splosh a bit of paint on it.





And this is the toilet and wash hand basin. Just for the sake of completeness, you understand.

We’ve had some good news on the plasterer front (we hope), and we’ve got 2 people coming tomorrow to look at the job. Fingers crossed we get someone signed up.

Anyway, to cheer ourselves up, we started work on the front garden. We ordered the topsoil (7 tonnes) to fill in the stony bits with proper soil, ready for planting shrubs. Shame the delivery lorry cracked the manhole cover on the front drive. All fixed now, though.

It’s just so nice to be able to make progress on at least one part of the house.

We had some devastating news last night. It seems our plasterer suddenly has had a “lot of work come in”, and won’t be available to start our job on Monday. This sort of thing is the pits. Our schedule was based around him starting on Monday. Time to search for a new plasterer. Sometimes, this house renovation work is depressing.

We’ve had a quote from the lovely people at Hockleys for a replacement upstairs bedroom window, and new front door (it needs to be hung the other way to allow access to the stairs). Not too bad.

We’re working on preparing the rooms for Roy the plasterer next Monday, when we should start to see some progress.

John the sparky is doing good work for us, chasing in the previous slightly shoddy rewire. It’s nice to be able to rely on someone during this harrowing period.

Building control have been, and there’s a number of things that need doing. We need air emission valves on the basin and toilet upstairs. We need the soil stack vent pipe extending 500mm above the window (new regs), and we need the upstairs waste water to be “bossed in” to the soil stack. We’ll see how much that little lot is going to cost us.

We also need to change the bedroom window – apparently, the size of the opening is too small for it to be deemed an exit route. So either we change the (brand new) window, or convert the downstairs doors to fire doors. We’ll get a quote.

We also need to do some work on the insulation in the loft. In the bathroom cupboard, the Triso Super 10 hasn’t been installed properly, and we need some secondary insulation fitting (Rockwool was suggested).

More expense, just to get the thing finished, has us spitting chips. Or something like that.

Our builder has informed us that he will no longer continue with our build, and will be closing his business down. He quoted (in a letter, hand-delivered to our house whilst we were away) the recession and “medical problems”. Those don’t seem to have prevented him continuing to work elsewhere, though.

So, resigned to the fact we have very little recourse (without taking legal action against him personally), we have to finish the build ourselves and with our own contractors (and paying them ourselves, of course). We’ll be out of pocket, but all we want is our house finished.

So, what’s left to do? The electrics have to be finished – upstairs and 2nd bedroom downstairs 2nd fix, and chasing in existing wiring, ready for plastering. All the rooms need to be plastered, some skimmed and some plastered onto new plasterboard. There’s some final work to be done on the carpentry (stair handrail and spindles, 3 doors to be fitted upstairs, etc etc).

We feel very angry that the house has been left in a sorry state in certain areas, and we’re expecting a visit from building control to find out what we need to do to enable us to get our completion certificate. That will be an interesting meeting.

The new potting shed is up, on its trendy breeze block and 4X2 timber base. Although it looks a little high in the air at the moment, once the extra topsoil goes in, the level at the bottom of the garden will be raised (and hopefully stop the small lakes appearing down there whenever it rains).

Whilst the builders are busying themselves in the kitchen, we’ve been working in the garden. We cleared some trees, and created a space where the new shed will go.

We’ve also been painting / treating the deck too. It looks so much better with a couple of coats of decking stain on it. Tess likes it too!

As part of the redesign, we were able to create an extra space at the bottom of the kitchen for the freezer and tumble drier. Above the worktop, yours truly put up a couple of shelves, and we’re able to display our wedding crockery. I even routed grooves in the shelf wood to allow the plates to stand up.

After a lot of fiddling around, the new kitchen is pretty much in. We’ve got to get the floor tiled, and there are some finishing touches to be made to the cupboards. At least, the kitchen is a usable space again.