Self Build

15 April 1998 After taking TEN YEARS to get planning permission we finally “cut the first sod” on St Patrick’s Day (17th March 1998). No…we don’t have giant moles! That’s just the top soil that was dug out to make way for the foundations of the lane.

25 September 1998	OK, over the last months we have made the final changes to the plans and specification of the new house. After going through the tender process we picked our builder and work for real began on Monday 14th September. Already the foundations have been dug, poured and passed by building control.
1 November 1998
	Despite of the weather we have made good progress over the last few weeks. The construction of the ground floor shell is nearing completion and some of the roof timbers have arrived on site. What we need now is about 8 weeks of sunshine so we can get the roof on (yeah…some chance).
15 November 1998
	The ground floor is pretty much finished now. Some of the first floor joists are up and several piece of steel have been craned up in readiness to support the next floor.(Whose is that shadow in the bottom left of the picture then?)
20 December 1998
	Almost Christmas now and the brick work is just a couple of days from completion. The weather has been quite wet and windy over the last couple of weeks which has hindered the brickies a little. After much debate we finally settled on this as the design for the chimneys. We wanted something with a bit of detail without being too fancy.
21 May 1999
	It’s been a while since I put any new pictures up here. I have taken a lot of video since the last update but I haven’t got round to actually capturing the pictures until now.Anyway…as you can see the roof is on and most of the windows are in (we’re waiting for the front and rear bays plus the French doors at the side). The plasterers are working on the first floor.
29 March 2000
	OK…we’ll be moving in soon now. I’m just getting round to updating this page.Anyway, here it is at last, the finished article!