Apologies and progress

I did warn you in my very first post on this blog that I might not be a very committed blogger and so it has come to pass - sorry! I have also been pretty lazy when it comes to taking pics of the house as it has come on over the last couple of months - somehow every time we are on site (which is pretty often) I get so caught up in looking and trying to imagine what it's going to be like that I forget to get the camera out! We have lots of pics of the exterior but very few of the inside and I really need to change that situation soon so stay tuned for an exclusive glimpse of our future living quarters.

Since my last post Railway Cottage has come on in leaps and bounds and is now on the verge of reaching that 'wind and watertight' milestone that once seemed a long way off - we are just awaiting delivery of our front door. The roof was recently completed in beautiful, natural slate and even though it was expensive I am so glad we didn't cut that particular corner - the slates have such a lovely colour and texture and I know they will just get better with age. The windows also went just after the Christmas holidays and I am really pleased with our choice - oak effect PVC mock sliding sashes with brushed steel hardware. I especially love the French doors that open from the kitchen and sunroom out onto what will hopefully one day be the deck. This week the weather has been lovely - dry and sunny - and the house should be getting its first coat of render.

Inside we have a temporary staircase, the first fix plumbing and electrics are complete and upstairs the studwork is finished ready for plastering. My favourite thing up there is where the landing overlooks the hallway - the space is double height and I can't wait to see it finished with a nice big light fitting.

We have also finalised kitchen plans - cream high gloss units with a black walnut worktop (be still, my beating heart!) and are currently up to our eyes in bathroom quotes, tile ideas, staircase designs and skirting board samples! It's stressful worrying about whether we are making the right choices and ones we will still love in years to come but I am trying to stick with my personal love of things that are good quality, simple and not too 'fashionable' in the hope that the interior will be both contemporary and timeless. Anyway, enough of my yakking - here are some pics...

Oh it was lovely when the roof trusses started going on - suddenly it felt like a house and that smell of new wood...yum!

Roof almost finished, windows in...


Look at those gorgeous slates! The concrete coping you see on the porch was originally going to be on either end of the main roof too but I'm glad we decided not to have it, the roof is beautiful just as it is. The porch will soon be clad in natural stone and the rest of the building will have a rough cast white render finish, like a traditional Irish cottage. Interior pics will follow, I promise!

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...

We have a floor!

Thanks to more hideous weather - torrential downpours that have gone on for days and days - things at the site have been delayed slightly, which I suppose is to be expected on any project, let alone one in the middle of a bog, during a Northern Irish winter. But the builders bless them have soldiered on in spite of the rain and wind and mud, and our floor slab is now complete!

Since the last lot of pics I posted three courses of blocks were built on top of the ringbeam and the cavities filled with earth created by the excavation work. The slabs were then craned into place and cut to fit before being 'grouted' with a layer of concrete. The next step is to place a layer of insulation on top of this, followed by the final screed which will be the actual floor of our house. Then the blockwork can begin.

This week we are heading to a few kitchen places which is enough to make me squeal with excitement - it's great seeing things progressing on site but truth be known I am all about the aesthetics and I have been designing this particular interior in my head for years now. Apparently we need to know the kitchen design fairly soon as it will affect the way the internal walls are constructed, so I am really excited to start choosing and seeing what it will look like. Anyway, enough rabbiting on, here are some pics...
This was after the blocks were added, before the slab arrived. You can see where our fireplace will be in the living room!

The blueprint

Things have been a bit hectic around here the last week or so and the weather took a major turn for the worse. The builders have had to bring in a pump to get water out of the site but by all accounts it's still resembled something from the WW2 trenches at times. Because it was so wet we didn't venture in to take pictures of the piles before they were capped but when we went out yesterday morning a very exciting development awaited us! The 'ringbeam' as it's called has now been fitted which is basically the same as foundations on a build that doesn't need piling, so you can now see the outline of all the rooms! Weirdly when you are standing in them they seem small but the sqare footage is much larger than our current house so I know they're not really; it's just hard to get an impression of the space when it's in 2D. In these pictures the digger was working to spread yet more layers of hardcore - the last to arrive before the precast floor slabs are laid.

This is us looking into the grown-ups' living room...

Facing into the sunroom

Mucky!

Progress...

Well as predicted I've been a bit lazy with the blogging, not to mention a bit lazy with actually going to take photos at the site! Things have moved on a fair bit since my last post, the ground has been cleared and no less than 200 tonnes of stone has been ferried in to create a more solid footing for the pile driver, which arrived on Thursday of last week to pound 26 - yes 26 - reinforced concrete posts 8 metres down into the bog where they finally found hard ground that will support the weight of our house. These pics show what it was like before the piling - I'll post some more soon but if you imagine this with a load of mini tower blocks sticking up out of the ground you'll get the picture. The piles have been cut to height now ready for the 'ringbeam', which I think is just more concrete connecting them all together, to be fitted before the pre-cast floor slab is delivered. And once that's done...walls! It's scary how fast it's moving and how much of the mortgage has been swallowed up already, but very exciting all the same.

Looking down our driveway...



This will be our back garden!

It begins...

Last week, a very exciting and kind of scary thing happened. After a very long, often frustrating process, we were finally, FINALLY given the green light to begin work on building our own house! There have been so many forms to fill in, hoops to jump through, meetings and phone calls to be had that I'd begun to think it wasn't meant to be. And that was hard because we are lucky to have a site in a place that is special to me; somewhere that evokes memories of my childhood, where I am close to my family and also where I feel close to my late father. Add to that the fact that it gives us a chance to enjoy more space, more privacy and will afford our son the opportunity to climb trees and explore and be a proper kid, not like the pale-faced brats in our development who spend half their time in front of the TV and the other half out doing things they shouldn't, and you could say this is the opportunity of a lifetime.
And for me, an adventure wouldn't be an adventure if I didn't write about it so here I am, blogging. And maybe I'll lose interest after a few weeks or maybe the build will prove to be so drawn-out that I lose the will to live, never mind blog about it, but for now I am planning to share the experience with anybody who wants to read about it. It's still early days, we've just begun clearing the site and so to start with here are some pics of the beautiful place we will soon be able to call home :) It's part of an old railway line and when the house is finished we plan to name it 'Railway Cottage' - although I'm guessing you figured that out already!

And here's that last view taken after the diggers moved in...