Caesaring

Latest back view - the scaffolding is at last away and our builder Dave has rendered (sorry about the bad pun in the title) the blockwork (brickwork) and the back of our development starts to show how neat it all is and how the single-story bit of the extension on the left sort-of matches the neighbour's (as intended.) (She says she now wishes she'd had the same sort of two-storey extension bit as well!) We wish we could have timed our works to match hers so we could have shared the extension wall rather than having that silly little gap. On the other hand, sharing a gutter might have been quite tricky. The woodwork for our French window (and the triangle to its top left) is measured-up and now on order - again, to match the neighbour's. The "lawn" in view is soon to be levelled and returfed... but not before a soakaway has been dug for the rainwater coming from the gutters at the back of the house... we'd hoped to pipe it to the rainwater sewer at the side of the house, but Thames Water seem unable to work out if they'll permit this (builder Alan and I say the architect should never have bothered asking them - after all the rainwater from side and front gutters already goes into this!) Meanwhile, Building Control want to have a test pit to see if a soakaway is OK... so we have to pray for dry weather during this test because we KNOW that if it's been raining heavily the goundwater rises to just about 1 foot below the level of the surface (as in the photo) and stays for ages... i.e., doesn't exactly soak away. (We know because when Alan dug the deep trench at the front/side for all our new services it was raining a lot and it kept flooding, causing the sides to collapse.... all sorted out and covered in, now. Oh, we only found where this rainwater drain actually ran when Alan broke into it with the digger - none of us had any idea it ran that far across away from the house at the side before turning back again....) Still, the outside nearly done (bar a few drainpipes, coats of paint, terrace, garden, fencing, parking areas at the front, lowered pavement for car access...) Inside, downstairs, at least, partition walls are coming on apace ... all quite exciting and going well, but quite impossible to photograph (yet) to show anything meaningful. In the meantime my room at home.. and the living room.. are full of electrical bits and fittings - and water plumbing bits - waiting for the moment there are enough bits of walls in place to wire-to or to run pipes through.