1 month to go ...

or at least that's what we're hoping. Ian is going great guns and every day is a busy day on site at the moment. We're hoping the main build will be done at the end of the month. We have agreed with Ian that the drive and some hard paving outside will sit outside the time constraints of the contract - mostly because we can't make up our minds what we want. We specified grasscrete as we wanted something permeable and that wouldn't look overly formal but then we decided we really didn't like the look of it so may go for hopsack bricks instead. Both options can be seen here.

On site the upstairs doors have been hung. They will eventually be painted white but they were kept in a shed at the reclaim yard and have been living in the playroom since they got to Girton so we will give them a few weeks in the warm house to dry out and acclimatise before painting them.

Here they are. Nick's put up a some of his lamp shade collection - he had a fun time last year lusting after expensive spun aluminium enamelled lampshades. He's purchased a few of them, some old and some new. 

Ian has set up one of the toilets. The cistern is designed to be built in so we will need to design and build some boxing around them. We will have 3 toilets. They are Ifo cera Es4. Swedish designed and using only 4 or 2.7 litres per flush they apparently 'set the standard' for water saving bogs! They will use our saved rainwater along with the washing machine.

The electricity was connected on Tuesday and our solar panels connected and commissioned today. We are getting the feed in tariff registration in by tomorrow - the deadline if the government's early tariff reduction is overturned. They set a tariff that they said would apply until April but then just before xmas suddenly halved it. The solar panel industry has been thrown into chaos as lots of orders were cancelled but Green Peace have taken it to court and so far been successful in arguing that the early tariff reduction was illegal.

Other progress this week - solar thermal panels are on the roof, the heating engineer is fitting the thermal store and finishing off the plumbing for the heating system. We have gas. The site hut has gone. Our large sliding doors separating the family room and the hallway downstairs have been fitted. These we had to have for building regs, to separate the kitchen from the stairs. They are hidden in the walls when open. I'll get some more pics of all this tomorrow.