Our New House–The Garage Rises!

A brief visit to our new house this afternoon – yesterday my hubby discovered the kitchen drain was blocked, and he wanted to return today to deal with it, which he did with little difficulty – it seems some builders’ concrete and other bits and pieces had been washed down there and he was able to clear it fairly quickly.

Work is going well on the new garage. Paul was setting out the studwork frames while Chris sawed the timber.

Here is Otto, the Builder’s Mate, lying down on the job!

He is Paul’s dog, quite an old gentleman now at age 10. He was so friendly and came right over to say hello, and lay on his back waving his paws, asking for a tummy rub! He spent most of the time flopping about in the shade and he was as good as gold. A real little softie!

Paul laying out the frames.

The damp proof course.

The frames going up! So exciting to see my hubby’s Man Cave taking shape at last! A nice big window from the annexe, which will have to come fairly low down below the work bench because of the height of it – it reaches right up to the roof! My hubby says he wants to cut those trees down, but I am trying to persuade him just to trim them down a bit – the one on the left is a bay, and I am looking forward to using its leaves in my cooking.

Inside, I popped in to the annexe kitchen to find that Paul had been as good as his word, and grouted the tiles that he put up yesterday. After he’s run the silicone sealant around, I can clean up in there, and start putting Mum’s stuff in. The window hinges need replacing because the window won’t stay open at present, and Andy will probably see to that on his return from holiday.

While my hubby was busy with various outside jobs, I unpacked another six boxes – of books this time, which are now in the bookcases in my ARTHaven and office. There’s a lot of dust, and I expect we’ll be struggling with that for several weeks but we’ll get on top of it in the end.

On the home front, my hubby has got most of the boxes and suitcases down from the loft, and we can decide what to keep and what to get rid of. He goes up there in the early morning before the sun has had a chance to heat the roof space – it gets extremely hot up there later in the day, above the insulation!

This morning I spent quite a time on the phone, contacting the local council who have made a bit of a pig’s ear out of our council tax bills, billing Mum as well as us! It’s all sorted now, hopefully. It was a bad start in our relationship, as they had not answered my letter of over a month ago. I also phoned the utility companies informing them of the date of our move and setting up direct debits etc., and transferring our broadband from the local firm we’ve been using to Sky who will handle everything from now on – TV, phone and broadband. I have opted for unlimited fibre broadband and I think we are in for a shock when we experience the lightning speed – between 30 and 40 Mbits/sec. – after the miserable 1 or less that we’ve had to put up with out here in the back of beyond in Rural Devon! Our downloads will be arriving yesterday… I am very pleased, because our entire package is going to cost considerably less than at present. We will be without the phone and the Internet for a week after our moving day while it’s all set up. It will be up to me to set up the router and I hope I can get the internal network running without any problems – but we do know someone in our village who is a total genius with computers and network problems and he will probably come and sort us out if necessary!