Getting really exciting now!

We visited the site today for the first time in a week and I was quite blown away by the amount of progress - most of the external walls are now up to ceiling height and once again our perception of the size of the house has changed - it looks huge! The window and door apertures on the ground floor are now largely complete too and this brings a new sense of how it will work with the surroundings, what we will see when we're doing the washing up, where we'll park our cars etc. Sounds mundane but with every passing week we get a new understanding of what it will actually be like to live there, and it's really exciting - almost enough to silence those nagging voices about money and how we are going to afford all of this!
Speaking of money, we got our first quote back for a kitchen and predictably enough it was about £4k over budget - we got a price for fitted appliances and solid American black walnut worktops...oh dear reader they are so beautiful I could lick them! But where we reside, in Realityville, we will probably have to live with some manky laminate for a few years, unless we want to be eating beans on toast every night. So back to the drawing board on that one. Here are some pics...

That little hole in the wall will be our fireplace, where the lovely wood-burning stove will be :)

Just above my head is the kitchen window. I'll probably spend a lot of time looking out of it! The house won't be this 'high' either, we still have a fair bit of fill to come in, I'm prediting ground level to be about a foot above where it currently lies.

This is the sunroom in the foreground, the large aperture you see in front of you will have French doors leading directly into the kitchen. Where all that rubble is, we hope to have a patio or decking in the future.

And this is a front view, with our enormous front door!
This week the builders also found something partially buried in the ground at the site and I have been marvelling at it all day - it's a really old bottle, corked, and filled with what smells like brandy! We have no idea where it might have come from but it looks really old; the glass is uneven, pitted and full of bubbles and the cork has partly rotted away - it's still sealed but the top portion is missing and the rest is black and yucky. You can already smell the contents and I'm half expecting it to crumble when it dries out. But for now I'm daydreaming about who it might have belonged to - a railway worker maybe? If only bottles could talk...