Oh boy, oh boy - a real house stands outside our caravan. There's a ground floor and ground floor external walls and ground floor internal walls and even a ceiling over part of it, which also means a first floor floor. We borrowed the builders' ladder yesterday evening and went up onto the first floor floor which makes a very nice flat roof, and surveyed the neighbouring gardens and fields. Lovely.

The timber frame putter-uppers, or erectors as is the technical term, are a great bunch of blokes. Very cheerful, very happy to help. Drink enormous quantities of what my mother calls 'mill tea'. They worked yesterday and the day before around the scaffolders, who are building practically a whole other house around the house ready for the erectors to do the first floor walls and the roof, and for the roofers to put the tiles on and the Veluxes in, and for us to put up render board and the plasterer to render it. Then we can take down the scaffolding - we have booked it for 12 weeks.
So we have, from the bottom up - foundations made of concrete poured into the ground, concrete blocks, damp proof membrane, a laminated (glulam) wood plank all the way round, very thick walls made of wood studs sheathed in eco-friendly panels made of something like sawdust pressed (very hard) to make a solid panel, another wood plank lying down, another wood plank standing up all the way round to hold the first floor floorjoists in position, a layer of solid waterproof chipboard which is the first floor.

We don't have a staircase so to get to our lovely first floor /flat rooftop we borrowed the builders' ladder and sat up there.

I ordered the windows yesterday - what a palaver. A delightful palaver of course but you wouldn't believe how many variables there are. First we sent the company a list of window sizes, then we decided how many panes per window, which ones would open, whether they opened inwards or outwards, and how many panes of glass (3), then whether to have trickle vents - not necessary if we have whole house ventilation but essential if we don't, then we decide on the paint colour, colour of handles, colour of a natty little metal strip which is a drip tray at the bottom of the frame, whether to have metal or timber external sills, whereabouts in the thickness of the wall the window goes, which windows need toughened glass, which need obscured glass. And so on. Long phone calls. Hopefully mostly sorted by now but we have scheduled a polite argument about paint colours tomorrow.

I'll put some more pictures up tomorrow.