I guess that some progress was made on the actual building today as the photo showing window holes that include lintels will prove, but as far as Hilary and I are concerned the day was all about moving our goods and chattels into storage. Despite our best intentions of rising at 7.00am, a quick breakfast, quick load up of the car, quick dash to storage and then off to get the rental van, it all fell apart when we woke just before 8.00am. From then on it was just "let's get this damn thing over with."


Our storage unit is great, it is brand new and 10' by 10' with a good ceiling height, the facilities are excellent, plenty of sack trucks laying around for use by customers, the managers are all good people and take a real interest in their customers. I only have two small gripes, one is that the units are lit only by light from the corridor when the door is open and it might be tricky to see in the wintertime, the second is that there is not much space for turning around for large vehicles. Most of my friends and family know that I am not the world's greatest reverser of backing up large vehicles and it was more by luck and watching Hilary waving at me in the wing mirrors that I managed not to hit anything. We sweated buckets during the day, for a start it was close to 70F plus we had to lug most of the stuff from upstairs, down the stairs across the conservatory, up the slope of the driveway and into the van. At least at the storage end we have a ground floor unit. We did two full loads from the house to the storage unit, a round trip each time of 20 miles and we followed this up with a trip to Crowndale tip in Tavistock where a lot of my old electronic projects that I intended to fix one day ended up. The main reason for the trip to Crowndale however was to dump the two beds that have been in the spare bedroom since we first moved here 12 years ago and they were donated by the previous owner of the house! We got the rental van back to its base about 5 minutes after they officially closed but no excess charges were made - we also managed to get it back with the low fuel light on having used just 10 litres of fuel that I put in at Tesco's when we first set out. Cost folks for 10 litres was just short of £10, yes for you Stateside that is roughly £5 or $10 per gallon........ now you know why we visit so much, we are trying to find a way to smuggle gas into the UK!





We still have a bit of stuff to put into storage, mostly small stuff from the attic eaves and this will go in dribs and drabs as we pass Plympton but the reason for the big push today is that tomorrow Simon and Sam may break into the existing house structure so that they can get access to inside and build the partition wall between the new downstairs bathrooms. They plan to blockboard over an existing doorway which will keep us out anyway. This will mean we are confined to just one half of the house until most of the building work is done, it will be like living in a one up one down all over again - shades of our early days as a married couple.

OK that is it for today, from now on apparent progress will be small as it is going to move inside but perhaps you will see more when the roof comes off and is moved forward. Now that will be exciting.