Now that's what I call an imposing entrance

Between showers

When the house gets going the blog gets quiet!
I'm not on site as much as poor Adam, whose doing this week on his own mostly having -ahem- let our main builder go home a little early.
So where are we now?
As you can see in the pix, the SIPs carcass is now covered in a grey fabric membrane (very 80's) which is part of the waterproofing, and blimey do we need it with this insane weather.
The timber porch (seen here from above) and walkway have been very demanding but are really stunning. The porch especially is a surprising and truly inspired element - with shades of our architect Sutherland Hussey's celebrated Tiree ferry shelter. It's very tall and imposing, with a door inset. Once through this you are very much in the 'compound' and you then ascend 14 shallow steps to the house - the line of the stairway apparently took donkeys years to get right in the design... You see, the ground is uneven and steep and the house is uphill - easy huh - you just build steps right?
Kind of - but to get them to run in a steady angle uphill (esp. when your engineer has set the house level too high) is not so easy. But it's been worth it - it's an amazing entrance.

One unexpected thing is the degree of 'out' of the SIPS carcass, which makes the (local larch) cladding very tricky and slow - it's an inch out in places instead of the 'tolerance' of 1cm, meaning the battening needs to be individually measured and fitted beneath. Other ongoing probs include sourcing a 360cm long window for the main room and the little matter of having no mortgage yet.

Lakeland scaffolding

Slightly last minute we found we did need scaffolding after all and it was Lakeland Scaffolding from Egremont that found the site and carried everything they needed up there. Did a great job for a very reasonable price, if you need scaffolding get these guys. www.lakelandscaffolding.co.uk

5 years and 5 days to get here....

And finally we're on site!!!!
(I think in this instance 4 exclamation marks are entirely justified)
In just 5 working days Adam and the Polish guys from SIPS carried - yes, carried - all this up a very very steep and muddy hill and put it together into a shape that closely resembles a house.

What's in a name?

Our casually coined name for Argent Close - the Love Shack - has definately stuck.
For several years I was under the impression that it was a private joke only used by us and our architect, Adam's brother. Then at a Planning meeting I noticed that our officer had some plans under her arm, with the typed heading 'The Love Shack, Cunsey'. She remained as humourless as ever nevertheless.
And now every component of the building has the moniker emblazoned in marker pen for future archaelogists to find and ponder.

Shack Shopping List

SIPS Industries bring our prefab panels on site today!
Meanwhile here is the current shopping list:

30 metres of hosepipe
16m of scaffolding
4 burly lads who don't give a toss for Health & Safety
Cordless telephone (landline in tomorrow)
£25,000

Some not available at Jewsons sadly.

Steely gaze

Here's the steel, on site on time and looking great c/o PPS of Ulverston.
There have had to be a few alterations en route, seem to be due to errors in engineering which arose from a few people making a few executive decisions en route and not managing to tell anyone else :-)
Of course as a mere layman it's hard to be confident enough to check with people when you notice something is not quite what you expected - in this case the 'base level' of the house was set too high (which is not insignificant on a sloping site), and this has meant redesigning the staircase up to the building and the porch at its foot.
Which in turn has meant our architect taking the drawings on his fishing holiday in Scotland. Sorry Charlie.