Week 36 - We're in!

The last week we've had a flooring fitter in to carpet upstairs and lay the engineered oak floor downstairs. We would never consider laying carpet ourselves as you just can't achieve the same finish as a professional. We've never had much luck with carpet fitters before and always been slightly dissapointed, we certainly wanted someone who was going to look after our freshly glossed skirting! We found a guy called Spike by recommendation, he's good at carpet fitting and laying wood flooring so we just let him get on with both which has saved me having to do the wood ourselves and freed us up to keep going with the long list of little jobs that need finishing off.

The bathroom is functional now but we still have to find time to scrub the grout residue off the tiles and only half the room has sealant around the edges, definitly not enough hours in the evenings for all of these little jobs.

We spent quite a while looking at different wood flooring and in the end settled for just an ordinary Tongue and Groove board that was suitable for glueing down to the concrete. It's suprisingly difficult to find anything other than the 'click' system flooring now which needs to be floated on a felt underlay/membrane. You end up with a slight bounce if you use that stuff and it doesn't work so well with the underfloor heating, our glued down floor is really firm and seems to transmit the heat well.

Iona has been taking a well earned rest on our newly aquired sofas and we've been generally basking in the warmth and comfort of our amazing new house - it's beyond our expectations and living in the static caravan for 6 months has definitely made us more appreciative of the creature comforts.

We're by no means finished, there's a long list of things to snag inside and a few quite large tasks to complete outside, but the pressure feels like it's off and we can afford to take a little more time to relax now rather than work flat out all the time. As such blog entries may be a little more sparodic from now on.

Major tasks left are:

• Sell caravan and remove from site
• Dig soak aways and lay the rainwater drainage
• Move shed into rear garden
• Grade the driveway back from the road, lay 16tons of hardcore and 10tons of gravel
• Build the canopy porch over the front door
• Build the decking to the rear of the house
• Stone walling, fencing, turfing, pathways and flower beds

If anyone fancies popping in for a visit please get in touch, we're more than happy to show off the fruits of our labours!