It has been some time since the last blog entry, I don’t really know where the time has gone exactly but several things have happened. Firstly, we’ve had quite a lot of holidays, that is to say several trips away for long weekends camping and visiting friends and family around the UK. It’s been a pretty long and hot summer and we’ve been making the most of having the freedom to take off whenever we want – hurrah! Secondly, some of the holidaying was due in part to some fairly nasty injuries incurred during the demolition phase. Amy has sciatica triggered by 2 days of heavy lifting whilst dismantling a chimney stack. She was doing this by herself because I had torn a muscle in my side which made any form of lifting a big no-no. Both injured and unable to get on with things we decided there was nothing else for it but to relax and work on the tans.
Things did not completely grind to a halt however as we had some invaluable help from our brother in law Chris who, despite whiling away the hours in the world of Procurement, is extremely handy at mega DIY projects. A couple of weekends graft from him really pushed things on and got us to a stage where we could start assembling the roof.
Chris grafting away
Amy is basically Project Managing the whole thing and there’s a lot of research going into materials, design and process and although things feel very slow at times it’s all an amazing learning experience. There have been times when we wondered if it would have been quicker and easier just to tear the whole lot down and start again however, from a building control perspective that would have meant going right back to the original foundations which would have been very costly. And so now we begin the rebuild. New walls, roof, windows and doors all required and that’s before we even start to think about the new kitchen, bathroom and all the nice homely stuff.