The piping has gone in for the bathrooms. The green plasterboard is waterproof - Well in theory it is anyway

There is a very long pipe run to the kitchen sink. The price that copper has climbed to, this makes it a very expensive sink.

Work has started on lining the window openings. The main bedroom with its matching door and window

The French windows

My strange little quirky window. It used to be the hatch for moving grain from the grain-dryer to the rolling mill.

I discovered today just how good the windows are. I specified windows with one half of them opening. It now seems that not only does that half open, but it can also be opened at the top as in tilt and turn. It gets even better, because once you have opened the window in the standard way, there is a hidden lever which opens the other half of the window as well.

It has been a week of problems. If I hadn't been at home already, I would have run away and gone home. The window sills are such odd sizes that they will all have to be made individually. I decided that since they are going to be painted, MDF would work well. A sheet of MDF is 1200mm wide, the window sills need to be 650mm wide. It will take a full sheet for each sill.

I finally ordered the twin wall steel flue for the woodburning stove. £5 change out of £1,000 - ouch !!

We decided that the window reveals and sills in the kitchen will be tiled. I have now noticed that the beautiful granite mullions have lumps on the back that protrude almost 2inches. We dare not try and cut it away as they are quite fragile. They will have to be boxed in before tiles can be put on.

Work is progressing at a fair speed now. Much faster than I had ever hoped.

It is so wonderful that it now looks like a house and I can see light at the end of the tunnel. An end to caravan living. What will we do with all that space - fill it very quickly I should imagine lol

The timber frames were all stuffed with lots of insulation slab.

You can get a better idea of the size of the kitchen now that the dry lining walls are in place.

Phil is trying to make himself feel at home in the lounge. He only really sees progress at weekends because at this time of year he leaves home in the dark and it is dark again before he returns at night.

The wall is up now that divides the plant room, which contains all the manifolds and tanks etc for the geothermal and underfloor heating

The wiring has all been run to where it needs to be. Parts of the walls look like spaghetti junction. I think there are 800 metres of wire altogether, plus the telephone wire and coax for TV and satellite. So probably 1,000 metres of wiring altogether. I had the builders amazed at how many sockets I wanted. But decided that never again do I want to have "Xmas trees" of socket adapters.

We also decided to future proof as much as we could and so have installed a TV point and telephone point in every room. We won't need them, but someone may do in the future.

The plasterboard is done in a few of the rooms now

The pink plasterboard is fire -retardent for the corner where the wood burning stove will be fitted. The stove is mainly for emergency use as the underfloor heating will provide most of the heating needed. But since we get quite a lot of power cuts in winter and seem to be fairly low down the list of priorities for repair, we decided that if we can keep one room warm it will make life much easier.

We have had one or two problems in the last couple of days - some of which have been resolved.

The gap between the wall tops and the roof was quite large in places because of the uneven granite walls

This has been filled with many tons of mortar.

The gable end was leaking quite badly in the kitchen

The leak was traced to a crack in the pointing just above the granite lintel. The whole gable has been repointed and hopefully the leak will have stopped.

There has also been a hitch with the piping for the under-floor heating. I think that when the piping was put in, on a freezing cold December day. The workers just wanted to get the job finished and go back to their families. The pies stand away from the wall by 200mm. This is making it difficult to box round them with the dry lining wall.

You cannot imagine how terrifying it is to find the workers attacking the concrete around the pipes with a heavy duty hammer drill with chisel on.

The final problem has not been resolved yet and might be one that I have to learn to live with.The door handle in the opening bedroom door/window is ludicrously low. I am unsure as to whether the door has been put on upside down or not.

The good news is that the floor for the study is in.

This has actually led to a change of bedroom for me and Phil. We were gouing to use the upstairs bedroom as ours because of the spectacular views down towards the fisheries. The walls are higher than we had imagined and this is the spectacular view that I get.

The "Bridge is now in place linking the study and the upstairs bedroom and the first of the insulation is in.

There has been a long period with no builders working. But we are making progress again.

The doors and windows arrived

In the last 10 days the windows and doors have gone in. What a difference it has made.

This triple window has been the most challenging. It was origionally a huge barn door.We built it up to windowsill height and then sourced granite sills and mullions to match the origional stonework

The timber for the stud walling. The worksofce for this stage. Including Wojtek who came over from Poland to get the work started.

Work is well on with the partition walls and the dry lining walls

The upper floor is now going in

Quick update before I go away for a week.
My mum died a few days ago and I have to go back to Yorkshire for the funeral, so I shall be missing for a while.
The pipes went in for the geothermal.
The white blobs are carrier bags full of sand to keep the pipes in position while they are covered over.

The hole through the wall for this piping was a challenge. It had to be almost 1 metre below ground level. Except that it had to be below outside ground level and the outside is almost a metre below internal floor level. Me and Phil had to excavate this rather deep hole and then break through 75cm granite wall. It was fun !!
The distribution manifolds were attached to the top of the pipes.

Work has now started on filling the hole in.
The ground levels are being altered at the same time as it makes sense to do this while the big machinery is on site. It will make the garden easier to deal with if it is level with gentle slopes rather than steep banking

The hole for the geothermal piping is now completed
There were snags along the way as always, including a burst hydraulic pipe on the digger and a break in the drain taking the water from the well under the garden to the burn. The well was running faster than I have ever seen it run, so the amount of water cascading into the hole was spactacular. The picture doesn't do it full justice because there is no scale or movement to it.
The broken pipe has finally been uncovered and the water is now piped through modern plastic pipe.
The house has squatters before we have even finished it.
There is a swallows nest in the bedroom block just above one of the windows. They must have started building the moment the roof was completed there.
Can you imagine their excitment as they tried to decide which of the new trusses to use, and admired the home improvements that we had done for them

The roof is complete !!

It was quite difficult getting the last of the ridge tiles because modern ones are totally different to the traditional old ones that are on. Most builder's merchants only stock the new type. I managed to find second hand ones at a reclamation yard in Kinellar.

The Polish workers set off back home on Sunday morning. They have quite a drive ahead of them as they were catching a ferry from Dover. They would then presumably have to drive across the continent from Dunkirk to Poznan in Poland.

Excavations were started for the huge hole in the garden. I can now hire out my lawn to film makers for WWII films.



The spoil heaps are hugeThe hole itself is going to be quite impressive when its finished. I shall have to throw someone down there to give a sense of scale.
Phil became a very happy man when Tony let him have drive of the digger.


Phil above Tony below


We have also discovered that the ground level outside the kitchen is considerably lower than we had thought.

This means that the hole inside the kitchen where the pipes will come in has to be correspondingly lower