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Coffee Towers

A blog by divorcingjack in General

  • Entries

    7

  • Comments

    34

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    2814

About this blog

A modern house build in the heart of a medieval Scottish town. With cake. 

Entries in this blog

Window dramas

So, I know I promised  tales of cladding and roofing in the last instalment, but I have reviewed my photo stream and in fact realised that the window install was the next thing. At the end of November (as we all know, winter is prime building time), we finally retrieved our bargain basement windows from storage and brought them to site. Ah, the bargain basement windows, a tale of joy, horror, stress, fury, confusion and eventual revenge all in one.    I should explain. When we had secu

Our house on a lorry

So, I just remembered that I actually had this blog. I'm killing time waiting for a phonecall, so, updates! Over a year later! Stuff has happened. Lots of stuff. Lots of money. Many tears. Some moments of "FFS, what?!", many moments of "HOW MUCH?" and "how the feck does this bloody shower fit together?" and a few, rare, beautiful moments of "woah, that looks awesome".    The last entry ended on a lovely "woah" moment of the successful pouring of our beautiful concrete floor throughout

MBC - part 1

We have our building warrant, FINALLY. I have a new job. The small one has started school.    MBC are here. The glorious day of the 29th August arrived, and so did the vans, carrying Brendan's crew. The sun was shining, tonnes of sand were delivered and painstakingly spread out. It's amazing how much time the MBC boys took to make sure everything was exactly level before carrying on, I found the level of care that was taken very reassuring, and of course Sean was on hand with a terribl

20 day Building Control

So, after the last entry - we had a clear site, filled with many, many tonnes of compacted hardcore. All was well. No more digging, the wobbly wall hadn't fallen down, angry neighbours had been pacified with cake.    Onwards and upwards!    Well, not quite. We still didn't have our building warrant. We had applied for a staged warrant for foundations and frame, naively thinking that this would be quicker that going for the full thing. We had submitted the MBC plans, MBC engin

Topsoil, topsoil everywhere..

So, after the last entry, we were back to scratch again, having managed to secure an additional piece of land and an alternative access to our plot. Lots of measuring and pacing out later, we were able to basically take what would have been the 2nd floor of the planned house, and put it on the ground floor. The ground floor footprint was made considerably bigger by this, and the overall shape was much less "passive-friendly", but for our tight site, it really was the only option. After a lot of

Expensive access .....

At the end of the last episode, we were the proud owners of a landlocked, overlooked, overgrown plot in the centre of a medieval conservation area. Easy to develop, right?    The plot was accessed through a narrow close, about 2cm too narrow for a transit (even with the mirrors folded and a brave/careless driver in charge), so completely impractical for the creation of a new house. On either side, the plot is overlooked by 3 storey blocks of flats, tight up against the boundary, and at

Finding the plot

Six years ago, we had a casual conversation with an architect friend about the fact that we'd like to build our own home. Taking the resulting vague, non-committal "hmmmmm" as rampant, unbridled enthusiasm, we started looking for plots. First thought - our very own back garden. It was massive, a pain in the arse to garden, and it would be free!   Back garden plot Pros:    - Free -Less gardening   Back Garden Plot Cons:   - On a notorious flood plain

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