The Waiting Game

We're good at waiting. We've become quite accustomed to it over the last couple of years - phone calls, checks, paperwork, meetings, money transfers, exchanges, completions. In fact, it sometimes seems that we spend more time waiting than doing. Today marks the beginning of February which makes it 2 years since we started seriously looking at land in the area where we are building. Now, there have been a number of self-imposed delays along the way - we bought the land in the summer of 2017 and didn't start speaking to builders until well into the following year because of planning our wedding.

Fast-forward to December 2018 and not only are we still happily married (!) but we'd started building too. It seemed that the waiting was finally over and we were getting really excited about seeing our house shoot up out of the ground, as they tend to do here. Alas, the universe has a sense of humor when it comes to such things. As you'll know from the last post, we encountered our first minor setback when the wall fell down a couple of weeks ago.

On top of that, as it turns out, the company who were quoting to shore up the land close to the steps have looked at their availability and decided that they're not able to do the work so the builders have had to reach out to a different company for a quote. The head architect called me this week to explain the reasons for the latest delay and to offer his very sincere apologies. I was at the pub at the time (with my friend, the real estate agent, who helped us source the land) which was less than ideal since it was rather noisy and I'd had a couple of beers. Whilst I wasn't able to understand everything, it was clear that the architect was indeed very sorry and that they were doing everything possible to expedite the process. There's not much that they can do and it's a bit frustrating for everyone involved.

It seems, therefore, that work on site is currently stalled but we are hopeful of restarting in the next couple of weeks. Whilst we've become used to waiting, we really are pretty keen to get this thing built so we can go and start the next phase of our lives. I'll post again when we are back up and running!

Not sure what this is for but needed an unused picture and it looked a little despairing! 

Filling the Void

In the last few weeks we’ve been through various revisions of the plans for our house with the builders and, in truth, there haven’t been many big, exciting changes. As much as I could write a blog post about moving plug sockets and marginal changes to window sizes, I’m not sure that it would make for especially compelling reading.

As such, I was thinking about what to do to fill the void between the detailed but boring planning stages and the start of construction, which should hopefully be only a month or two away now. I don’t want to stop the updates as there has been a lot of positive feedback from readers (we’re at around 5000 page views to date) but also because writing this blog is quite cathartic and has on more than one occasion helped us with actual decision making. Assuming I can keep it up, it will be a nice written and visual record of this process. Perhaps I shall turn it into a shiny coffee-table book when we’re done.

What I’ve decided to do is to write a short piece about each room or feature of the house, each with slightly more detailed plans. That way, we can cover the house in more detail but in more manageable bites. I’ll endeavor to get a post out each week.