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Well, it's been nearly 9 months since we moved in, and I didn't leave a list last time, so here are the parts of the last list that still needed work. As you will see there still remains a lot of stuff to do. You'll soon learn why they're still here 😞 more stone work - still on the list but much reduced rainwater soakaways - still on the list rainwater collection system - decided after deliberating a lot to leave this out for now as it's not a condition backfilling - partly done, still on the list concrete lego brick retaining wall - delivered, to be fitted Flooring - en-suite and "attic" room left to do Wood cladding - still on the list Fit internal doors - one last door to do Fit en suite - basin and bog outstanding Build MY garage - still on the list A green roof system, because its on the planning application, and may be required for certificate of completion (unless someone can enlighten me as to how to avoid this, and be able to delay the installation) - still on the list, but good news on the completion element for this below. Back in August 2025 we moved into a building site, and worked hard to get the remaining bedrooms completed before our first Christmas for which SWMBO had invited MY family. Not sure whether to label this action as bullying, blackmail, fraud, spousal abuse or whether another specific crime was committed. But, we got there, and a fantastic Christmas was had. Also during this time, we managed to secure a buyer for our old house. We had decided to stop calling it home to start the process of removing 29 years of emotional attachment to the place in which we brought up our two children, and in December we removed pretty much all the remaining furniture in readiness for Christmas and what we thought would be a completion on the sale in January/February of 2026. You may recall me asking questions about a retaining wall which was holding up the new buyers getting a mortgage. Now, this wall was not a part of the house but on our boundary about 2 feet or so away from the side wall of the house. It has a crack in it and the lender wanted it repaired. We had requested an SE to come give us a report, hopefully to tell the lender to stop being a d1ck, and we had arranged to meet them on the 6th January. We arrived the day before to find it difficult to open the front door because there was some plasterboard behind it which had come from the landing ceiling at the top of the stairs. This had been caused by a leaking water pipe in the loft. Subsequent water bills showed that 28m3 of water had come through the ceiling - we now had a major water leak insurance claim repair to deal with. And the upshot of the SE visit the following day was they said it did need fixing. B0110cks!! So, now instead of a completion in Jan/Feb, we were looking at a completion in 3-6 months. We then found out that the retaining wall was our liability, and not the people who owned the land behind it. This put a huge dent in our plans. Everything we had planned to do in the first half of 2026 (work on the house and a ski trip) went on hold as we got someone in to repair the wall (in March, once the rain had stopped) and to deal with the insurance company who thought it was a great idea to appoint two separate companies to complete the drying out/repair work - WHAT COULD GO WRONG? We sat down, and reworked our plans for work on the house. This has been limited to work that we could carry out with little spend because either it was something outside in the "garden" (read mud bath), we already had the materials on site, or the materials required were not hugely expensive. What have we been up to in between complaining to the insurance company about the lack of co-ordination and progress (WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?) We bought parts to start finishing off the rainwater drainage pipework, which also allowed us to do our first bit of hard landscaping, some steps down to one side of the house, and starting off the path as well. We still had a lot of stone cladding to complete, so once the weather improved, I set to completing most of this. There are still a few odd bits and pieces to do once the balcony and connecting bridge have been completed (one of the large ticket items that is on hold). The other main area of work has been the en-suite bathroom, where we spent a little bit of savings and created a service wall on two sides, got it plastered and painted, and also installed the walk-in shower. After a bit of back and forth, SWMBO agreed to a wall hung toilet pan (thank you to those who responded to my cry for help). So, the en-suite requires said bog, a basin and vanity, tiling behind the basin, flooring and a door to be completed. All materials on site or on order, and the plan is to get on with that over the next few weeks. So, where does all this leave us? Well, the bits of good news we've had:- - our BCO visited just before Christmas and gave us a list of things he'd like to see before he issued a completion certificate, and on that list found that the green roof was not required to be fitted, but just some documentation about what we proposed to put up there. I know what many will think, but we will probably still install one at some point, but it does mean we can delay installing it until after completion. - I mentioned we secured a buyer for the old house. Well, they have stuck around through all our tribulations and we will be completing on June 5th. Come mid June we should have the following major items to complete, and the funds to do them: Balcony including balustrade Connecting bridge to balcony Balustrade by internal stairwell Exterior porch floor rainwater soakaways - still on the list concrete lego brick retaining wall and backfilling Flooring - "attic" room left to do Wood cladding Finish the en suite - as outlined above Build MY garage - still on the list A green roof system Once all that is done we might also be ready to clear the site of the touring caravan we used for the first four years of weekends and holiday time we spent building the house and a lot of left over building materials. I'm glad to say there is very little of that as I resisted the "order 10% more than you need" rule, and am pleased to say it only bit me twice in extra delivery charges. This has meant we have incurred zero cost for skips/clearaway etc. and, no, we have not buried it all in a very big hole in the 3 acre field we bought. There's still a lot to do, but as we approach June 5th with lightened hearts, we have a much clearer view of some form of end game, with may hours to be spent creating a new garden around our NEW HOME!!

Yes, we moved into our new house on Monday last week, pretty much 9 months to the day since we broke ground and 15 months after we purchased the plot. We know we’ve been very lucky with our build. The weather has generally been in our favour and we had no supply issues or delays. Above all, we’ve had some excellent people working for us without whom we could not have achieved the build. There are too many stars to mention here but if you look through the blog you will see them all get a shout out for their excellent work as it happened. Ahead of the move, Mrs P. did a superhuman job getting everything packed, and the move itself went relatively smoothly, with dry weather and no mishaps. Amazingly, Mrs P. also managed to unpack most of those boxes within a few days, though we do still have some residual boxes to deal with in due course. Moving in day: As we all know, moving house is always a stressful business and moving to a new house is no different. But it is a relief to finally get in - there is always the nagging fear that some disaster will strike at the last minute while the house remains unoccupied. But of course, all was fine. Is our build complete? Not quite. We have some minor electrical and joinery items outstanding, both inside and outside; we have the garden landscaping well under way but some distance from completion as you will see from the photos below. Beyond that, there is a list of jobs of the sort you’ll have following any house move: curtains, blinds, wardrobes, shelving, etc. - but these are ‘house move’ rather than ‘house build’ tasks imo. We do still have to obtain Building Control sign-off and there’s a VAT reclaim to do. On the BC front we had our ‘As Built’ air-tightness test performed by Richard Harris of Peninsular Energy Compliance this week (highly recommended). The result is 1.16m m3/m2 at 50hPa on the envelope basis. Virtually the same figure for Air Changes per Hour , as our envelope area is 583m2 and our volume is coincidentally 580m3. We are very happy with 1.2 ACH. Air-tightness test under way: We have been in the house for a week now and we are really happy with the way it feels and works for us. It’s warm, draft-free, well-lit, quiet, and comfortable; the layout and spaces are working just as we hoped. We are both sure we are going to really love living here. The plant room is (to me) surprisingly warm, running at 25-26 deg C due presumably to the amount of heat-generating equipment in there. I raised this as a separate Build Hub topic but the consensus seems to be that it's not an issue, so I shan't worry. As a side benefit, it does make a splendid clothes airing room. https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/46744-hot-plant-room/ Energy use The combination of solar panels, batteries, ASHP and insulation levels seems to be working well - in our first week we used 0.7kWh from the grid and exported 63kWh. Not bad for February. I need to work out our best tariff option but that’s a job for the future. Enough talk, time for some more photos (some taken just before we moved in)... Kitchen/dining/lounge: Hall: Bathrooms - master ensuite: Shower room: Guest ensuite: Bedrooms Master bedroom: Guest bedroom: Bed 3 / hobby room (Ok, so we still have some unpacking to do.) Landscaping - plenty to do yet. The layout is literally as clear as mud to me... I'm sure it will all be fine in the end(!) And finally... Troy likes the new house - it still has yogurt pots that need licking out Dashboard: Contractor days on site this past two weeks: 15 Contractor days on site since build start: 587 person days That 587 days is well over the 500 days which requires HSE being notified of the build using form F10 (which we did). HSE have not spoken to us or troubled us at all and the F10 notification is simple and costs nothing, so I would recommend any self-builder do so - if you are unfortunate and have an incident it’s surely means less chance of getting into hot water if you registered properly. Budget: I confess that in the final weeks we have gone a bit beyond our self-imposed budget contingency and dipped slightly into savings, but that is really down to choices we have made about the quality of the fit, e.g joinery, kitchen, bathroom equipment etc., and also the extent of the landscaping we have chosen to do. We could probably have remained well within contingency had we needed to but luckily we had some leeway. Plan: We did it! Conclusion: Overall, we set out to use the entire proceeds of our previous house sale to buy a plot and build a better house, and we believe we have achieved that. Thanks once again to all the dedicated and skilled people who have worked on our house and made the build a success. Especial thanks to Mrs P. who indulged my yearning to do a build provided brilliant design input and kept the whole show on the road throughout - a truly wonderful person! That then dear friends is the final blog! Thank you for following us and for your kind words of encouragement and support through our project.

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 different name for it), so if I’m going to mark the year in point it has to be now, as a year ago on Tuesday I clambered up onto the roof of da Bungalow and started sliding tiles at my mate Steve. I miss him. He’s not dead or anything - though his dress sense would tell you otherwise - but he’s off the project and that isn’t comfortable. He buggered his shoulder blocking up to damp and hasn't been back working on site since. He still visits to let me know that it’s not up to standard and we should be further on, so basically all the things I know already, but it’s not the same as working together. That was rather fun. In a twisted way. So, how far has a year got us? Insides are plastered out and oven ready for our mist coats, which hopefully start Monday. I’m hoping we’ve no buried leaks or missing cables, time will tell. Outside a small groundwork’s team are half way through connecting the house to the drains. When I dug down to find the capped sewer pipe it looked closer to the surface than I remembered - which featured in the playlist of yet another sleepless night. I’ve quite a wide repertoire of tumble dryer worries, yet another talent courtesy of the build. Thankfully it turns out my water level did me proud and the poo pipes protruding from the house are at the predicted level with respect to the sewer so happy days. It’s really odd building a plastic bag to live in. OK, it’s a well insulated plastic bag, but it’s still a really big plastic bag. It’s beautifully illustrated by our breathing ceilings. We continued the hideously gaudy coloured VCL up the side walls and over the ceilings, putting in as few staples as we could to reduce the number of penetrations. Eventually the house itself was sealed up bar the missing front door and loft hatch. We took the precaution of putting the first layer of loft insulation up to avoid condensation on the ceiling VCL, using “Industrial polypropylene strapping” stapled to underside of the joists before the VCL was put up, so the strapping took the weight rather than the VCL. It worked a treat and even allowed insulation to be laid even where the VCL hadn’t been done. Standing upstairs a weird thing constantly happened. The VCL above us very slowly rose and fell - it was as if the house was breathing. Oddly mesmerising. I should have recorded a video. But there was no time to stand and look. The plasterer had lots in his books so couldn’t get to us till the end of January, so we took that as our target. We had no way of knowing if that was doable (it wasn’t) but the concept was that by setting a target we’d go faster so we charged up the cattle prods. I thought I knew it would be stressful being driven by such a deadline. As in so many build things I had underestimated badly, however. Some things went better than I’d expected. I’d planned to pull in the wires myself but instead Steve the Sparks (the confusingly named son of Steve of the buggered shoulder who did the demo and the founds with me) did it all in a couple of days. The speed of the man, but oh, the radio! He was the first of several with the ubiquitous Makita site radio playing ‘80s stuff. We’d been a no radios site till then. But we had by then lots of fluffy insulation, so I relented as long as it was on indoors only and relatively quiet. And having said yes to one it’s a lot harder to say no to others so the tackers (plasterboarders) and the plasterers all followed suit. Did I really need Bananarama on a loop in my head with everything else whizzing round? Another thing that went well and a quicker than feared was pulling in the water pipes. On the odd moment I was alone on site it took very little time to actually pull the HEP2O pipes through. OK it left a mess of tails above the cylinder but that could be left till after the tackers started. A lot of things got categorised as ‘after the tackers get started’, which was sensible but not always satisfying. The theory of radial plumbing, no joints buried, I found seductive. However the theory floundered when it met the Aqualisa buried shower and bath controls. That continues to cause me angst and will do until I’ve finally accepted that I’ve dealt with the last wet patch (yes, technically it’s called a recurring nightmare). One thing that didn’t go so well was the vent ducts. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I’d decided to go for 90mm rather than the smaller version and we’d ended up with 253mm metal web joists (pozis) rather than the 304mm I’d planned. It also wasn’t helped by a glulam blocking the ideal route from the main house into the loft above the downstairs bedroom. So it was a fiddle, (polite version) and the pressure was on as the duct itself only arrived on the 28th of January, mostly due to a supply issue. I’d thought long and hard about duct routing, but things are never as one imagines. The MVHR unit will sit in the garage next to (but not touching for fear of noise) the wall of the downstairs bedroom. All duct pass through the loft above said bedroom and then enter the house itself. That loft is a disturbing piece of modern art. I’m glad that I will never see it again (fingers crossed). Fifteen 90mm corrugated white tubes bound together wrapped in fluffy brown insulation snaking through the trusses. Where they pass into the house there is a Quatermass of airtight foam, as if the house was punctured by the hydra and it bleed green goo. Getting the insulation up there was surreal. It’s a v restricted space and the only way to do it was to poke my upper body through a gap in the ceiling VCL and distribute the insulation. It pretty much fills the loft now. When I start sleeping properly again I’ll have nightmares about all that. It wasn’t all bad news though. One bit that worked really well was taking all the ducts for upstairs straight up the front gable wall, with the ducts insulated but never passing through the VCL. The bit that didn’t work was the downstairs ducts getting over the glulam. It meant they started their journey into the house with a tight s bend. The corrugated outer skin helped prevent the pipes pulling through the holes in the wall and floor that enabled them to dive down into the posi layer. We also discovered a downside to our very heavily engineered joist plan above our main room. We are very keen to have nice, stiff floors upstairs with little movement. So we ended up with pairs of 147mm posis with only about 240mm gap between each pair. Looking at it there was literally more joist than gap. Felt good to walk on. Getting ducting through however… On top of that we had a flue to avoid, and a barrier formed by two well insulated pipes that run from the UFH manifold to the cylinder via a diversion due to steelwork - another obvious bit that I failed to anticipate. Thank goodness the bookends (the guys doing the solar pv/inverter/battery/UFH/heat pump/UVC/etc.) suggested getting the cylinder in when they did. We call them bookends as either appear to be unable to work without the other. Odd world, innit. So, with those pipes too in place it’s v congested in various areas. Much swearing and jumping up and down onto stepladders and skinned knuckles later and the vent pipes were done, with all 15 vent ducts poking out into the garage like some 1950s comedy alien being. An alien that sits and waits, and when I walk past it it spits distilled water onto me. Seriously. Yet another ‘I’d never have imagined that’ moment. I'm guessing that the warm, wet air from the house is being sucked through all the vent pipes by the passing breezes. The garage is unheated. When that air hits the bit of the ducts in the garage some of the water vapour condenses onto the inner walls of the ducts. As I walk past I cause a disturbance which makes the condensation coalesce into droplets that then fall on me. What a fabulous illustration of how much an MVHR unit needs a drain. Anyway, eventually, meaning two weeks later than hoped, we were ready for the tackers. I’d amassed a long list of ‘I’ll do that when the tackers are here’ tasks, oh my, will I never learn! To start with there was a constant stream of questions from the three guys. All of them reasonable, but they tended to be neatly timed so I’d just start picking up tools to do something myself when I distant “Geoff” would be heard so I’d put everything back down and toddle off to find which bit that particular tacker was staring at. Originally we’d planned to put an OSB layer on all walls and the upstairs ceilings. I'd gone for raised tie trusses to reclaim some of the ceiling heights lost early in the design process. The idea was that the little sloped bit at the top of each wall would be hidden by the extra layer of studs and insulation. It was designed to the millimetre. Mistake. The tackers assured me they would be careful of the ceiling VCL, and indeed they were. The few times they caught the VCL or when it needed easing they called me in to bring my repair tape. (Note to others - put spare VCL at corners, it’s so easy to make it too tight for the tackers). So they convinced us to ditch the ceiling OSB idea. Only if course, I’d factored in the thickness of the OSB into my calcs for the raised tie trusses. So when the walls were boarded in a couple of places the roof bracing was just a tiny bit too low. I should have allowed a contingency but hey ho, double boarding the walls sorted it where needed. Fortunate to say the least. Plasterboard changes the place. We’d spent weeks amongst soft, spongy walls, with insulation sitting behind and in front of the VCL. Very quiet. Lovely in fact. But plasterboard puts all the echo back and then some. Plus it finally shows the rooms for the shape and size they are. Sounds daft given how long we've spent in those rooms but seeing them plasterboarded was a bit of a shock in places. The best example of that is the hallway. Drawing layouts and trying to imagine spaces only gets you so far. We designed in a double height space just inside the front door, nice straight stairs on one side. Bit of a sort of gallery on the other. But it’s huge. I knew all the dimensions by heart but I still didn’t know how big it was going to turn out. We are going to have to get creative to get it feeling right. Fortunately for me our principle aesthetics consultant (i.e. J) is brilliant, so I just know it’ll turn out well. The plasterers were a dream. Tidy, polite, quiet (if you ignore Bananrama and Simply Red constantly playing in the background) and they also did a super job. A pleasure to work with. The only wrinkle was the ergovents. I installed them in their plenums precisely as per the instructions. What a shame I didn’t check with the plasterers first. The instructions said the vents should be either flush or max 1mm below the plasterboard, which I super carefully did. The plasterers started when the upstairs was boarded, and they took one look at the vents and said “no”. They need 3mm to 4mm proud. Turns out the instructions are really targeted on the continent, where, apparently, they rarely skim. We skim. We need more depth. Thank heavens downstairs hadn’t been boarded by then. All but one upstairs I could get to from the loft, slitting the VCL (I really must remember to go back and repair those slits) adjusting the brackets so they could be skimmed properly. The downstairs ones were easy to adjust, ahead of boarding. The plaster has reduced the echo a bit, and as it’s drying and its colour gets lighter it’s given an even better impression of the rooms. The plasterers were much less high maintenance giving Rolly and me time to put the wood cladding on the rear gable (massively more time consuming than expected) which meant that the three skylights could be fitted. Fantastic. I borrowed a leaf blower from Rolly. The intention was to do a half arsed leak test using a temporary loft hatch. Never did get used, we never put the time aside, there was always a short term deadline hogging the priority. We'll find out in time whether it was needed. Another one for the ‘hope’ list.