Friday morning and I'm off to London to see me girls. It's the end of Em's four years at Imperial and so we are having a girly afternoon tea-for-three in a Posh Hotel- fulfilling a promise made to Em four years ago.

On the way I'm delivering what I hope will be the final changes to the timber frame drawings. I have taken to getting into London by driving to Epping, which is at the end of the Central Line, and Tubing it in from there. Our frame makers are on the way to Epping, next to the M11 in Saffron Walden.

This finalising of the frame drawings is a big milestone. To get them right we have to have not only the full dimensions of the house, inner and outer, heights and all, but also the positions of all the service entries to the house, exact sizes of windows and positions of things like the woodburning stoves. All done!

We also have dates: 25th is the bricklayer doing the plinth, 29th the scaffolder, and the 3rd of July the frame arrives. Yes!!

R is building the massive garden wall - he was making a very small trial wall yesterday evening to compare different colours of mortar, over which we bickered amiably.

I am still bogged down in airtightness and now have the equivalent of a fair-sized book downloaded from the internet, printed out and ready to read. Good job it's a long Tube journey.