Catching Up

Last day of November ... this is where we're at:

Front of the house ... all of the remaining SIPS panels are finally on site, with another couple of days required to fit them all together.














Rear of house:

 

Looking through the extension to our bedroom above.  (Adrian using the space busy planing wood for the extension cladding needed next week.)

 

Pat and Alan have built a lovely porch, ready for the tilers to include it with the roof.

At long last, after endless weekends of wet weather, Adrian has managed to make a start on the garden room roof which still needs tiling.  No leaks yet, but it will be good to get it finished!

 



Christmas planning

An advert on the radio yesterday said, "Make your house your home this Christmas".  Hannah replied, with her 12 year-old sarcasm, "I don't think so"!  We are really looking forward to spending Christmas this year with all the Greaneys, up with Adrian's mum and dad in Norfolk - all 14 of us!  Mind you, they are still finishing off their own two-year-project house renovations and haven't yet fitted the kitchen!  The heat is on.  But at least they now have proper bathrooms - bonus.  Bob has put a lot of thought (hopefully while getting on with his building) into delegating tasks to all the grandchildren: Hannah is in charge of fancy serviette folding, Emma the music, cousin Cameron (supervised by Health & Safety trained dad) candles, Jessica the table decorations, Oliver the table place names.  And nearly-three-year-old Abigail?  Being cute, I reckon!  She can help me with the games.

Today is a lovely sunny day (15 degrees C) with a beautiful blue sky. (Things seem so much easier to handle in the sunshine.) Adrian is finally able to get on with tiling the garden room roof, and we have two builders here today (Saturday) trying to catch up with fitting the roof panels.  We are hoping by the skin of our teeth to stick to the schedule of roof tillers and windows being fitted in the second week of December.

Pictures to follow ...

Feeling Low

What a disappointing day. Yesterday's promised delivery of the overdue roof panels only half materialised, and the wrong half for the order of what needs doing.  The crew of lads waiting to put everything together had a mostly wasted day whilst they awaited the second half of the delivery which never came.  Then at the end of the day we were told it would come at 6.30am this morning and maybe we'd like to warn the neighbours, which I (apologetically) duly did.  So, up at 6.00am this morning, the delivery did arrive, at 6.45am, and was duly unloaded, only to find that it was incomplete.  On phoning the SIPS panel company we were eventually told that THE REMAINING PANELS ARE NOT EVEN YET MADE!!!  This is two weeks after the whole panels process should have been completed, and after being continually told that the delivery was due "in a few days", "next week" or "by Friday".  The delay in itself is frustrating enough, but realising that we have been completely lied to (although the SIPS company claim to know nothing about this latest fiasco) is what is most annoying.  Why can't people just do what they're supposed to?????  We've learned that we're way too trusting, assuming that what we've ordered will automatically turn up, and need to be much more demanding.  The main reason we chose this SIPS panel option was the speed of construction (supposedly 2-3 weeks), which started back on 27 October.  Hmffffffff.  We now have the embarrassment of potentially having to delay yet again the roof tiling team, and the windows delivery, while Christmas is rapidly approaching.

On top of that, today has included these other frustrations: the oak beam delivered for the porch construction is noticeably warped and will have to be replaced (hopefully tomorrow whilst the tele-handler is here to manoeuvre it); the timber planks delivered for the extension fascia boards are horribly marked and black so will have to be replaced; when I returned to the house this afternoon I found a JCB repair van parked outside the house because the tele-handler had broken down; a delivery of plasterboard is now blocking the drive, AND it continued to rain, A LOT.

All in all, a bit of a rubbish day.  The little voice in my ear saying "it'll be worth it" is barely audible today - but not completely disappeared. 

Dreaming

All four of us snuggled into the girls' caravan beds at bedtime, enjoying a rare moment of cosy 'family time', Adrian said: "We won't have such a tiny space to enjoy this in the new house."  Hannah replied, "Yes we will.  In the utility room"!

Last picture with no roof ...

And a request for pictures of Dobby up the scaffolding. (Pickle's not so brave and can't climb ladders like his brother.)

Caravan life

Preparing dinner, chopping an onion ... woops, it slips and shoots in to ... our bedroom (next to the kitchen area)!  "Help - there's an onion on my clock radio!" Anyone else have that problem?

We have an 'upstairs'!

This has been the state of the build for the past two weeks while we await the delayed roof panels.

 Emma's bedroom looking through to Hannah's (we've had a LOT of rain).

 Hallway balcony.

 Landing.

 

Fingers crossed the roof panels arrive on Monday 24 November, with the roof tiles and windows delayed until the 2nd week of December.  Will we manage to be mostly weather tight by Christmas? Watch this space ...

Ladders and Diggers

Excited to explore the new upper floor.

 "Please can I make a Hagrid's Hut in my new bedroom?"!

 Lots of ladder climbing involved in house-building.

 

 More digger fun ...

 Hannah was allowed to do the 'tricky' bit - look at Adrian's face!

 

 All of the pipes and wires servicing the caravan are now buried under ground ready for the winter.

Frustrating delay

No pictures today (they take an absolute age to upload with our annoying slow broadband) but I can report that we have a bit of a hold up with the roof which is slowing us down by a couple of weeks.  Bother.  The company we have ordered them from apparently has a sudden overload of orders, plus a broken piece of machinery which is slowing down their manufacture - even though the whole kit was supposed to have been delivered a couple of weeks ago.  All wall panels are up apart from the roof panels, so unfortunately we're not weathertight yet.

We've had to delay the roof tiler and windows delivery by a couple of weeks which is annoying.  After a couple of weeks off site, while a separate crew were here to install the SIPS panels, Pat and Alan were back today to continue with what they can.  Today they dug a drain trench through the middle of the ground floor in preparation for the new kitchen, utility room and downstairs bathroom.  What they really need to get on with is fitting the soffits and fascias ahead of the roof tiling, but they can't do this until the roof is on - and Adrian is going to be making these and painting them (when the weather dries up) in some special long-lasting paint treatment.

The only good thing about not having builders on site for a while is the privacy we've enjoyed for a few days, and peace and quiet.  We have been able to use the house toilet whenever we like (the SIPS panel builders came as early as 7.00am and worked right through until 5.00pm), and access the washing machine (and more importantly the tumble dryer!) at all hours.

To finish, I'll just share with you our experience in the early hours of yesterday morning when the rain drumming on the caravan roof was SO LOUD that we didn't hear the clock radio alarm go off at 6.00am ... not that it mattered as we'd been awake for ages!

Mud, mud, glorious mud

It's amazing how quickly something out-of-the-ordinary becomes quite mundane.  I trekked up the garden path this evening in wellies and anorak in the pouring rain, in the dark with my head torch, with my day's third load of washing to go in the washing machine up at the 'house', which is currently swimming in three or four inches of rainwater.  However frustrating this may seem I always remind myself of the millions of women around the world who have no access to clean running water, or toilets and showers.  My life in a caravan is luxury compared to many.

During this past week mud has featured quite highly in our day-to-day life following a bad delivery of the Type 1 MOT I mentioned in a previous blog.  The material was clearly sub-standard and after a couple of days of heavy rain, and heavy vehicles turning, the driveway was turned to complete sludge and looked like this ...

Adrian got a manager to come and assess the situation, who confessed that the surface should not look as it did, even after all the rain.  Thankfully the company agreed to remove the layer of mud (which should have been rock hard and better draining) and replace it with something much better suited to the job.  Our driveway is once again useable for parking (much better for the neighbours to have our vehicles off the road) and looks like this (with a glimpse of the new upper-floor wall panels) ...

Bridleways B&B

We have visitors!  Adrian's mum and dad have come to stay ... luckily keen campers.  Adrian and I are sleeping in the garden room on the sofa bed with the cats, and Bob and Pam are in the caravan with the girls.  We still have use of various friends' and neighbours' bathrooms which is helpful.  All is well!  I'm just breaking off to eat breakfast pancakes ...

One week later ...

I've got so much blogging to catch up with so here are a few pictures (thanks to Bob who arrived at the crucial moment) of the steel frame being installed which was quite a drama.  The construction crew were expecting the extension A-frames to be in two parts to be  bolted together, but they hadn't spotted on the plans that the frame came already welded together and were therefore much harder to manoeuvre.  There was a delay of a couple of days whilst a huge crane was hired.

 

After all that excitement it was lovely to have a beautiful rainbow gleaming over the scaffolding.  We've had so much rain recently which has caused all sorts of problems, but that's another story ...