Four months on

and what do we have to show for it?

Some plusses:

1. we now have new carpet everywhere and it's great, thanks. Particularly loving our hand-woven Brintons designer stuff in the hallway. We went for something a bit different there, expecting people to say "eek" and wonder what to make of it, but so far, everyone has loved it. Clearly our tastes are less unpalatable than we thought.
2. we love the big kitchen and everyone who sees it gets an instant "wow" factor from it. It's also helping us burn off the calories gained from all the cooking going on, walking backwards and forwards across the room to get things from all the cupboards
3. the house is starting to get a rhythm to it, in terms of how we use it. OK, so there are still some spots to finish off; a few things that are more "down" than "away" and we always seem to have one box more clutter than we have cupboards to hide it in (the garage is now too full!), for the main part things are starting to find their place.
4. we're slowly kitting out the utility, putting up cupboards and shelves - just a matter of putting in some new units to replace the knackered ones that used to be in the kitchen
5. we now have a funky cupboard hiding our electricity meter, meaning I don't keep looking over my shoulder in the study to see how fast it's whizzing round, each time I turn something on.
6. this cupboard also has lots of shelving around it, so it feels like a proper study (although it begs the question why did we paint it if we were just going to hide the walls with books)

Things have also sufficiently settled that we've got down to doing other things around the house. Progress so far includes

1. putting loads more insulation in the loft over the "old" part of the house, where there wasn't much (just the 4 inches or so, rather than the currently recommended 8 feet, or whatever). I can thoroughly recommend Eco-Wool to you. It's made from recycled plastic bottles, so plenty of bonus eco-points and it is genuinely nice to use - it feels like the filling from synthetic duvets, rather than horrid glass fibre
2. properly boarding part of the loft so it can really be used for storage (necessary now that we have extra insulation in a lot of the areas where we were previously dumping things). Boarding was complicated somewhat by our rafters. They don't seem to be at the same spacing as all the loft boarding materials expect them to be. Hence I've had to double board (it was just easier than cutting the boards to size) to ensure there aren't any dodgy overlaps of board. I put some Knauf Space Board between the layers of boards to provide some extra insulation over that part of the loft because you can't get enough regular insulating material in the areas you want to board. Four inches of old glass fibre between the rafters and 52mm of this in between the layers of board should help.
3. building a raised veg patch in the garden. We decided that the gravelled area at the end of the garden was not really doing a useful job as a sitting/eating area, so we got rid of the gravel, dug over the soil and built a raised bed. It's about 10ft x 8ft and 12in tall, sawn and screwed together with my own fair hands (and power tools). It contains just about 3 tons of soil, carted around by me and it had better grow us bucket loads of exceedingly tasty vegetables or I will be decidedly miffed.

We have our plan for reclaiming the rest of the garden. It involves yet more shovelling, this time putting the bark chippings from the old play area, er, elsewhere (probably into a big sack at first), then rotovating all the muddy area, levelling it out with a ton or so extra soil and then turfing it. We'll probably have to leave the turfing until Spring, to make sure it doesn't get frosted, but as soon as I've finished the loft, I'll get on to the digging and rotovating. The only (presently obvious) complication there is going to be rotovating the soil since we discovered that the drainage pipe for the soakaway is only a couple of inches below the surface of the mud, rather than the 12 inches or so that it should be (well done Paul the Builder). So we're going to have to work around that VERY carefully.

Back in the world of outstanding problems with the house, Paul the Builder never came back to us to fix any of his mistakes. After taking some legal advice, we gave him a "reasonable" amount of time to come and fix it and got on with employing other people to come and fix it. We now have an invoice of all the things he needs to pay us back for, it's up to about £1200.

All we have to do now is decide whether we take him to court over it (and risk him counter-suing for his £5,000 or so of surprising - to the point of punitive - new costs) or just forget about it all and write off the £1200 as a reasonable fee to get the house working AND see the back of the useless clown. Still, I'd rather have had the money to fritter away on Christmas presents (or more bits of hifi or a camera or... well anything other than fixing a badly fitted shower).

The coup de gras in that particular saga recently was the denoument of the shower episode. You'll remember the background from this blog update. Anyway, we had the engineer fix it for us and eventually got the bill from the manufacturer that we were warned would come if it proved to be an installation defect. We, reasonably, thought this bill should go to Paul the Builder, since he solemnly promised it was installed correctly and must be a manufacturing fault and got the manufacturer to redirect the invoice to him. Surprise, surprise, we get another letter from the manufacturer saying that Paul the Builder denied all knowledge of the problem and that he had no involvement in the process. Well, I assume it was Paul the Builder, he decided to be a real man about it and get his wife to write and sign the letter. Presumably if we keep pestering him about his liability, he'll get his dad onto us.

So, there we go. This time, last year, we'd just got planning permission and were getting building regs sorted out and thinking about choosing builders. Now, we're basically finished and - for the main part - everything we can't deal with is our own problem.

Looking back, 2007 seems to have flown by. Although at the time, parts of it during the building work seemed to be going backwards, not just Glacially slowly forward.

Next time, we buy somewhere that does everything we need from the start.