So here it is - the headquarters for the next few months



He made it out from under - a well-deserved Raja's Cup and a piece of cake


A great day on site - lovely weather although a bit cold. Not so great for R who spent most of it lying on his stomach under the caravan with an 8-ton jack (that is it lifts 8 tons, doesn't weigh 8 tons), lifting the caravan so that he could put stabilising blocks of concrete and railway sleepers underneath. A bit scary but all done now. I acted as gofer which was fine by me as I didn't want to lie under the caravan - slight touch of claustrophobia there. In fact what happened for the first hour or so was that the ground under the jack compacted and he had to keep adding bits of wood under it to stop it disappearing into the ground. I took down some of the last trees which were in the actual place where the house would be. Buttered scones for tea.

So now the van is ready for me to clean it - carpet cleaning machine tomorrow. It's actually in quite good shape. We reckoned we only could spare about £1000 for the van and we looked at what you could get for £1000..... not a lot is the answer to that one, unless very lucky. And we are going to be in it till November. So then we realised that if we bought a better van we would be able to sell it on fairly easily and maybe the difference between purchase and sale price might not be much more than £1000. Maybe. We wanted 3 bedrooms for The Girls and for any friends who might want to brave it. So this is an invitation to any friends who would like to visit our little patch of mud to come and stay. We have double glazing and a certain amount of insulation under the floor. Or wait till the summer!

We got water!! Yippee - another small step in a long journey.

Storm has blown over, trees still standing, caravan still upright - I'm glad we weren't living on site today, though.

We have just got fully dimensioned working drawings which are going off to various builders to get quotes - we move along...

Picture: The way through the woods for the water main.


The caravan arrived on site last Friday and it is huge - makes the site look quite small! I was at work on Friday morning and I called R at 11am to see how things were going, and he was half way up a tree lopping some branches off so the caravan on its lorry could get onto the site. He had an exciting day - the caravan is on site but needs quite a lot doing to get it up and running. I had naively thought that we would wheel it on, connect a couple of pipes and that would be that. Not so unfortunately - a lot of lugging about to get it East, a lot of thinking about how best to jack it up so it's level and stable, and then a carpet cleaner to freshen it up - it's not really dirty, just needs sprucing up a bit. I can't remember if I said this but it has got double glazing, electric panel heaters and a gas fire which may go some way to keeping us from freezing.

We now have a phone line - hooray - the first utility installed. A stand pipe for water and a board for electric meters. Plus the place is definitely beginning to look more like a building site and less like a garden.

Things have started up again now after the traditional three-week Builders' Break over Christmas. Last week was very exciting, but more from the undergraound point of view. The local mole population were probably feeling very put out. A Bloke-with-a-digger arrived on Monday morning and started on the water main. He was great, and as a friend of ours said, "You can't beat a good Bloke With A Digger. He put in trenches for water electricity and telephone, sorted out how the sewage from the caravan was going to work and pulled up the stumps of the trees which were cut down before Christmas.

We now have a five-ton diseased tree stump on the land..... Better than a five-ton diseased tree stump _in_ the land I suppose. The picture above shows our lovely new shed overshadowed by the stumps.



The water was the most exciting trench because of being about 150 metres long and having to come through the local shrubland which is now looking a bit sorry for itself.

Anyway Craig was great - very neat and tidy, and we now wait for the various statutory undertakers to come up with their sides of the bargains and connect the ends of the various pipes and wires to give us power and water and phone.

And what is the point of that, I hear you say, when you haven't got the House yet. You can't even put the phone on a tree stump because they've all been pulled up. That folks is the next story - The Caravan.