Managing hold ups on the project

In addition to labouring on anything we’re able to, our main role continues to be ordering materials and making sure that trades are onsite as and when they need to be.

As well as painting I’ve turned my hand to tiling, a job I haven’t done in 30 years, but have really enjoyed. So I’ll be getting on with tiling for the rest of the house and saving us a few hundred pounds along the way.

The only hold-up we’ve had lately has been with the company supplying the lintels for the windows and door frame. They made three attempts to bring the right materials and each time the lintels were wrong.

Rather than waiting for a fourth delivery, we went with an idea that the blockworkers offered up as a solution. To cut a long story short, they suggested modifying the blockwork to accommodate the size of the lintels already supplied.

We checked the idea with Potton and they were happy with the suggestion so we then negotiated with the company that supplied them to let us have the last delivery free of charge. This just goes to show that it can really pay to listen to your workers as they come with a wealth of experience in their trade.

We had to provide extra money to pay the blockworkers to fit the lintels, which took another three days, but afterwards we found we were about £500 better off than if we’d paid full price for the lintels we’d ordered. Great news as it gave us a little extra to spend elsewhere.

We are tired but still very excited about the whole process of our build. It amazes us to think that this was a barren site on 1 March this year and now, only a few months later, we are well on the way to having the house of our dreams!