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Da Bungalow

A blog by G and J in General

  • Entries

    19

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About this blog

Self build 2: The Sequel…

Entries in this blog

The house itself.

Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda…

And yes, that title is a nod to the wisdom of the Beverley Knight song.  But it also applies to self building, methinks.   [Health Warning: The following diatribe focuses on the 2% that’s not gone perfectly, and risks massively underplaying the 99% which has gone right.  But maybe that focus is what makes selfbuild what it is, and why for normal people, it just doesn’t add up.]   We are now in, living at no. 11.   Well, not this exact moment in fact.  Right now we are cooking
The house itself.

Happy anniversary darling…

Should I even call you darling?   Probably not, but as you (not you specifically, sitting there in your ‘should have been put in the wash weeks ago’ dressing gown, I mean the buildhub fraternity) have been so great a moral support I can’t help feeling some degree of affection.     Anyway, there’s no chance of me drawing breath this week, or any week till we move out of the ice box (AKA rental - and thats the polite version, I now have a dif
The house itself.

Post house sale stressy disorder…

Once upon a time a deluded wrinkly, his much less wrinkly wife and their noisy little dog left their almost fairy tale rural retreat to live in a freezing rented bungalow while they buggered about trying to build a new semi-urban retreat nearby.  (How clever am I avoiding the word suburban!).  Everything would have gone swimmingly but for the fact that the head of the wrinkly was just too full.   It sort of still is I think.  In the four months since the last post (stop thinking of a b
The house itself.

Leaving our first build…

We apologise for the interruption in our scheduled programme.    Normal service will be resumed shortly.    Lots has happened on the build which is great and as it should be and all that, but I just can’t write about that right now.    Instead my head is full of leaving Bramble.  34 years ago, over a third of a century, we put flesh on the skeleton of a house and we breathed life into it.     And it’s been a constant ever since.  Now we finally decided to
The house itself.

If you want to get ahead, get a hat…

That was an advertising slogan from the 40’s and 50’s, which persisted in popular culture into my childhood in the 60’s (I’m a wrinkly, but not that much of a wrinkly).  And oh boy, with the recent downpours we desperately needed a hat on the house.     As kids we used to turn the phrase around - “if you want to get a hat, get a head”.  That’s what counted for humour back then.  But like all my frivolous tool purchases over the years that turn out to be really useful if not vital durin
The house itself.

We need to be trussed up…

Blogging: an activity where the perpetrator converts trivia into prose and in doing so reorganises their own otherwise disordered mind.  Possible side effects: perpetrator enhancing feelings of self importance; boredom amongst those reading; history being rewritten.    I find it interesting to contemplate why I don’t have quite such a burning need to blog at the mo.  I’ve always enjoyed working with wood and metal and power tools.  And that’s what I’ve been playing at for the last thre
The house itself.

Nearly a complete walls up….

On your marks: Get set : Wait!   Day 1 of panel erecting was rained off.  Humph.  I tried to pretend to be human again by popping into town with J for a spot of bargain hunting (for stuff we don’t need, natch) but inside I’m still a self build automaton.  My recovery won’t really start till we move in methinks.   Next day we start the day by admiring my new paddling pools. The previous week I carefully swathed the piles of panels with tarps before it rained oodles.  Good theo

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