J Lawson's Blog Space

Well, things have happened since my last post.

Only remaining job for contractor is to replace some flashing. hard to believe it but the last pieces arrived damaged and the architect had to condemn the work so material was reordered. It was due to arrive last week so with a bit of luck the job is complete.

The architect just got back from his holidays and is due to go over for a last visit if he has assurances that the outstanding issues have been ticked off.

Other good news is that BT assure us that phone line and broadband are now working. I haven’t been able to have that verified, but I’m optimistic.

We’ve bought ferry tickets to be up second week in September so maybe we’ll be able to say at long last JOB DONE.

We’ll take advantage of the trip to bring up some furniture and hardwood logs for the stove.

Just testing the google author markup

There is no sign of work being carried out by BT to connect phone/broadband, so I’m beginning to doubt that everything will be in place by the end of the month as promised. Good thing is that the local MSP seems to have taken our case up as an illustration of how BT is damaging development in the Highlands. He contacted me last week to see if their had been progress and as I had heard nought from BT he said he would contact his man in BT.

Google+

Yes I’ve again been neglecting the blog, but as at least one person in the world is interested in the build project I’ll add a few posts during the coming days. Not sure things will be chronological but will try.

I’ll back-date these in the blog so they will appear below this post and I’ll put in some comments later.

A quick trip to Orbost Gallery before we left to find some finishing touches. We liked this piece by Marion Macphee.

Well we now have a nice new PC on the desk, but no Internet. We ordered a phone line and broadband from BT mid-November 2010 and we still have neither. The incompetence of BT is beyond belief, they have messed up just about everything possible and their support is rubbish. I’ve been kicking up a stink and had two letters of complaint published in the WHFP but nothing seems to get these guys to get the job done. I’ve even resorted to twitter which does in fact seem to have some effect. @BTCare now follows me. To start with they jumped over themselves to provide feedback, but they inevitably got it wrong and so now they are a bit more cautious.

The amazing thing is that a cable was drawn from the house to the main telecomms cable which is on our side of the road. But BT don’t seem to be capable of putting in a duct and connecting the two cables together. They have had teams out almost twice a month for 7 months and still have not managed!

Cladding is Siberian Larch, which is starting to turn silver/grey. This is what happens with untreated wood. Many people have asked us if we are going to paint, and are surprised when we say we will not. You see many houses all over Europe covered in larch even using larch “slates” as roofing. It will last well beyond our lifetimes.

Have to check that all the nails and screws are stainless as other metals will mark the wood.

We’ll have to get blinds quite quickly. Sun (umm when it’s shining that is) streams in the window on the right well before 5 a.m. We taped bin liners to try and create some night. I’d forgotten just how much daylight there is during the summer!

We’ll also need some pictures on the walls.

We should really say RE-done as much of the tiling had to be ripped off and started again. Many tiles were chipped, badly cut and completely off. Can’t understand how they let the tiles continue when they saw how bad the job was done! I hope they can get that showerhead to the vertical, it annoys us seeing it squint like that. The shower glass is not what we wanted, we asked for low-iron crystal glass to avoid the green effect of ordinary reinforced glass. But that got lost in translation.

The mirror is cracked so that will be replaced and we can see that they steam up very quickly and will need to put a heating element behind. The LED downlights take a long time to reach full power and even then are a little weak so we have asked architects to look into improvements.

When planning the underfloor heating, it was decided to have the master bedroom AND ensuite on the same circuit which we realise now was silly. We can’t warm up the shower using underfloor without also heating the bedroom up. We have wired for towel heaters but had decided against, we might have to change our minds on that. We’ll see. Maybe with some fancy programming we can heat the bathroom up for the morning shower without turning the bedroom into a sauna.