December - bit of progress on the build and a bit of Christmas ... ooh and a bit of crochet

Our last Christmas in Blean - Hurrah!!! (No wise cracks from anyone please)

Crochet has kept me going through these last few months so here's a bit of that just to brighten things up a little

A portaloo, nasty temporary door and a skip full of rubbish

Electricians putting in the first fix through the utility room

Archie & Greg came home for Christmas

Such a joy to see the beautiful slates going on. December 2013

Starting to really look like a house now - the garage at the front is still to be added hence the strange blank look to the front view

Yay!! That's our House!

Spotted from the Primary School on the road below ours - with it's pink felt hat on... this was very exciting as we hadn't seen it from this angle before

And here's some action shots of Will spraying the soffits and facias at the workshop. This was in an endeavour to save us money and speed things up on the build....sadly it was weeks before they went up!

Last Steels to the roof

At the beginning of October, one sunny day, the very last steels were bought to site and carefully lowered in place 

Why is it so fascinating watching a crane? The driver wasn't at all fascinated with what he was doing, when I arrived he looked like he had fallen asleep in his cab. Very funny later though when he couldn't get the truck out of the mud, he woke up then :)

Lovely sky through our roof

Time to take a break and enjoy the satisfaction of the seeing the last steel in place 

Progress on the Roof in September

Once we had the joy of receiving the news from the planning department that we had been approved at the new height we were able to progress in earnest, happy in the knowledge that what we were building wouldn't have to be taken down or fought for.... in fact we could approach the site with a lightness of step and stand back and admire how lovely how house-to-be was looking...

A few photos showing the progress of roof trusses

This complicated gable above the master bedroom seems to have caused a lot of "head scratching"!!

Spot the grinning brickies!

This shows just how perfectly our house sits in the road :)

Roof Construction Pics during nail biting re-application

Steels and trusses

Will -"Hmm yep that's high!! ....."

The Height Issue and how it was Resolved

So, back in July I left this blog with the news that our house had grown too high, not in fact by 400mm as I said in the last post but by well over a metre. If our house stood in splendid isolation you would never know but unfortunately it's very near it's neighbours and so the error was glaringly obvious!
As I said previously, we decided that the most simple solution would be to alter the pitch of the roof so our architect provided us with new drawings to submit to the council as a non material amendment which should only take 2 weeks to go through. This was not the right thing to do!! After a week we received yet another call from the council to say that the change in pitch altered the look of the house too much and so they needed a complete new full application which would take another 2 months to be dealt with.... aaargh!! Back to the stomach churning! This would obviously cost us lots more and keep the build on hold for way longer plus the costs and practical conundrums of making the alterations.
After much discussion and worry and more phone calls to the council we decided instead to submit a new full application at the new higher height and hope that we wouldn't receive objections. This was not totally straight forward because at the very same time we learnt that our architect had gone in to administration - it all happens on this build :(((
We took the project to another local architect to make the new drawings and swiftly submit to the council - even more cost and talk of the builder taking away the scaffolding, portaloo etc because of the ongoing hire costs. After a few weeks we made the difficult decision to instruct the builder to pick up tools again and carry on as we'd had no signs of any objections being submitted. This was a particularly horrid few weeks though as the thought of paying for the roof construction with the chance of being made to take it down again was just so scary. Luckily it was the right decision and the relief was enormous when the application was passed - with NO objections too so what was that all about?!!!