Newbuild4@blogspot.com

Times have changed somewhat.  The top photo is taken from a drone. Didn’t know what a drone was 11 years ago and now they are multi tasking - some tasks good and others not so.  The second photo is of the foundations concreted.  This is exciting news for me, but I don’t expect it to be for anyone else reading this. There have been times over the last 6 months especially when I have felt as if I was back in full time employment as a secretary - which was my profession decades ago.  We’ve had a long drawn out ‘conversation’ with the land registry, which we eventually won, and now I am knee deep in reports and surveys and trying to keep up with all the certification we need these days.  In years gone by for example  the only insulation we had to have was a few inches of fibreglass in the loft.  Now you are expected to live in a totally insulated box, where not a whiff of a draught or a mobile phone signal can enter.  And to protect our beloved walnut...

 Hi to anyone who has found my latest blog, entitled Newbuild4, which is exactly what it is.  We did our first self build during the hot summer of 1976.  Our second in 1983. Our  third in 2014, when we came back from 18 years in Spain.  And now we are about to embark on our fourth.  Are you totally mad I hear you say.  Quite possibly.   We have owned the land we are about to build on for almost 40 years - it was the garden of new build number 2, which we kept when we sold the house to make our move to Spain, as an insurance policy for when we eventually came back to England.  The plot has a really nice piece of woodland attached to it, which is the main reason why we are staying here rather than move somewhere else.  We have shared this space with badgers, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and many varieties of birds etc.  We couldn’t bear the thought of a developer bulldozing everything down to make way for housing.   Two years ago we...