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This post is part of a series (I will write it all up as a blog one day when I have had time to develope a sense of perspective) ; but now I am raw - angry, knackered, wiser. After we had parted company with the builder, a specialist Durisol company were given a brief to take down any face of the house which showed any evidence of poor building practice or any other error. Down came the west, south, north walls: the east wall, bless it, was the one that got blown down: so we just built up the bit that fell down. Massive, massive error when the original builders (I now know having reviewed the time lapse imagery) had spent a significant amount of time hammering some of the east wall Durisol blocks back into place, when they could have re-laid them with some care in the first place. We poured the west, south and north faces (the ones we rebuilt completely ourselves) with no problems at all. You can hear this coming can't you? One whole section of the east wall just burst during the pour. About a cubic meter of concrete landed on the floor from two meters up. Cue an hour of shoveling. And swearing and murderous feelings channeled into demonic shoveling. I used to think that I wanted to spend our money locally. And since very few companies 'do' Durisol, most building firms were going to need training. Which we attended. And here's the thing: the company staff didn't. The MD did, but the staff didn't. And frankly they couldn't have given a stuff about the build. So when the boss absented himself for extended periods, it was a recipe for disaster. Worse, even his staff couldn't contact him by phone. Sadly, my little attempt at investing in localism died a death today. Garstang and South Lancaster does what it does. If something isn't known or isn't always like it has been, and forever will be, they don't want to know. I suspect that's not unique to Lancashire. One potential roofer came round late today, and sneered gently at everything we showed him. Passiv? Whassat? MVHR whaaafor? He'd never seen a roof designed to our spec - no call for it; shakes? Good luck with that; Sikaflex? Never heard of it (its the brand name of a Preston-based roofing materials production company; local people in the village work there); vaulted ceiling? Don't have much call for that. "But I've been roofing round here for 25 years and I'm sure I could do an excellent job." I'll bet. But not on our cash. Yet another post that has to end with..... Still, if we can't take a joke, we shouldn't have started should we?