I last wrote some crap about our build back at the beginning of this five-month exercise in complete disruption of our existence. A more naive time, in which I speculated on the likelihood of this not going as swimmingly well as it had started out.  And, to be honest... it didn't, in more ways than I could have imagined. Not because the various involved parties fell out - although they did, quite spectacularly on occasion - but because shit really does happen. Some of it inevitable small shit that had the capacity to break our ultimate vision. Some, rather big shit involving five tonnes of steelwork that deflected rather more than our structural engineer had calculated it should.  The repairs associated with this latter element are currently underway on the upper floors...

But I don't want to be be negative about it at the moment - because we have just about finished moving into the new space, the crap is mostly behind us and, in general, I think we've got most of it right.  The Christmas break was an ideal opportunity to test it out with others and sixteen of us on New Years Eve found it worked really well for mass food and drink and general end-of-decade celebration. Which was a large part of our motivation for doing it. So I'm not going to list all the difficult stuff we've been through - I'll do that another time - but just post a few pictures for the time being.

​Here are a few along the journey:

And four of the end result:

I've written stuff about this house, its history and our plans before - from the decision to move in, to the work in the roof, the living in shit years, the bathrooms...  But I've only alluded to the last big chunk. So here I am, writing about the last big chunk. Because, suddenly, we find that we are now pretty committed to seeing it through. We have a 3 tonne digger in the garden. Actually, we have no garden. We have a building site.

We set out on this last phase over a year ago, by way of a conversation with Kevin at KJC, a chance encounter resulting from me seeing someone recommend  him on Nextdoor and thinking he might be a good chap to help us develop our ideas. And we didn't really bother going anywhere else, because we liked the way he thought about what we wanted to achieve, his energy, his disparaging attitude to most domestic building projects. Also, he is slowly redeveloping the entire Carshalton Park environs and has won awards for the highest density of billboards in a suburban area. He drinks tea by the bucketful and is really good at swearing. We couldn't have asked for more.

Kev has our project on his site, although the plans have moved on somewhat since he put it there and he hasn't updated them.  Because he is really good at swearing but not at updating his website. You can watch a video of a slightly more up-to-date version of the model below, on the left. ​ Or, if you want to play about with it, click on the '3D Model Viewer ' link on the right, below and wait a while for it to load up in your web browser.  You can access the controls to manipulate it on the right, once it's loaded.

We've actually played around with the internals quite a lot since KJC produced this model and I buggered about with it to try and convey some of the detail of what we wanted. But, in any case, it looks nothing like this at the moment. At the time of writing, this is what it looks like:

Kevin ran a tender for us.  And after lots of meetings and discussions and negotiation and cogitation, we commissioned Tom Power of Tom Power Design to come and build our vision for us. Tom was massively enthusiastic about the project, which is mostly what sold him to us.  He is also an expert in variation management and runs a firm full of slackers who have taken two weeks just to knock a load of shit down. He even employs his own family so they can turn up and charge me a load more money.

I'm joking, obviously. After two weeks of frenzied demolition activity, the footings are going in right outside my window as I type. We are very happy so far.  But there are 13 weeks of a 15 week project to go and ample time for everyone to fall out. Which is what I'm told often happens. Not seeing any sign of it yet to be honest.

Nothing focuses the mind more than seeing a three-tonne digger turn up in your back garden and start tearing the crap out of everything (my Dad's ponds are GONE! :-) ). Some early pictures of 'knocking shit down' below. Inevitably, I will be writing more on this topic in the coming weeks...

... and, by turn, no-one can interfere with her millinery decisions.

I've kept this topic off the blog: It consumes enough of my thinking as it is, without expending time talking about it on here.  But... for some time I've been thinking about writing down my perspective on it - to the extent that I started making notes of important points, to work into something more consumable.

And then I came across this letter, from John Sheppard to his MP. It covers pretty much everything. I don't know what the hell has happened to our politics, which I would once have defended to the the world:

" Dear Mr Graham,

Thank you for your letter of 25th May, addressed to myself, my wife and my daughter. I have been intending to write to you in more detail for some time, but with so many issues regarding the Government’s determination to leave the European Union I have struggled to know where to begin. However with the Withdrawal Bill returning to the House of Commons for extremely brief consideration of the many amendments this week I can delay no longer.

Perhaps I should start by saying that I do not respect the outcome of the 2016 advisory referendum. I do, of course, respect the likelihood that the vast majority of those who voted in favour of leaving did so in good faith, believing what they had been told by people that they should have been able to trust. However, as we know, the leave campaigns built their arguments around misinformation, half-truths, and outright lies. Some of your most senior colleagues chose to ride around the country in a big red bus with a lie about the size of our payments to the EU on the side, and followed it up with false claims about imminent expansion of the EU. Other campaigners chose to stoke fears about immigration, making false claims about the cost of immigration to the country and the impact this had on public services. Leave campaigners did a remarkable job of convincing people that everything they didn’t like was somehow the fault of “Brussels”, and that leaving the EU would somehow make everything better again. Few of these claims of marvellous benefits survive today.

I know that some people feel that Remain campaigners also lied. I suggest that there is a fundamental difference between over-estimating the speed at which damage would occur, and telling untruths about simple facts like the size of our payments. However I cannot accept that if both sides misled the electorate then everything balances out and the result becomes trustworthy.
Recent revelations cast even further doubt on the respectability of the referendum. Did the alleged manipulation by Cambridge Analytica using stolen personal data skew the result? Or the alleged overspending resulting from collusion between Leave.EU and BeLeave working with AggregateIQ? Or the alleged covert funding by the Russian Government?

The referendum was carried out in a sea of misinformation, and the result cannot be considered to be an informed decision.

My next concern is how the advisory referendum became the eternal, unquestionable, “Will of the People”. The Referendum Act says nothing about what should happen after the referendum, and I believe that the Parliamentary briefing papers at the time the Bill was going through Parliament made it clear that the referendum was advisory. I can only assume that this is why Parliament did not feel the need to build in the precautions that would be required in most mature democracies before a referendum could lead to change of this magnitude, such as a requirement for a super-majority or for all four constituent nations of the United Kingdom to vote in favour of change. Prominent leave campaigners stated on several occasions that they would not regard a vote of 52% to 48% in favour of remaining to be a conclusive result, and so we can be sure that they would not have called such a result the “The Will of the People” and simply accepted that they had lost. Then, somehow, by the morning of 24th June 2016 a vote of 51.9% to 48.1% in favour of leaving had become an overwhelming mandate, and we must leave whatever the cost, whatever damage we do to our economy, however much we lose standing and influence in the World, and however much we undermine our children’s prospects. I cannot understand this.

I accept that after the referendum the Government could not ignore the result. They also could not simply execute the leave campaigners’ plans, as there weren’t any. They could have sought to consider the options, to study the impact that various decisions might have, to hold a public debate and build consensus to agree a way forward, but they did not. Mr Cameron decided to go home and buy a new shed. Mrs May became Prime Minister without the party’s leadership selection process running to completion, and appeared to make all the decisions in private, perhaps with advice from a few trusted advisors such as the now long-departed Mr Timothy, and presented the lot in her Lancaster House speech. She dismissed the concerns of the 16,141,241 who had voted to remain, and treated us to charming expressions such as “Citizens of Nowhere”. Was this supposed to persuade us that her approach was correct?

I could carry on at length. I could discuss the Government’s attempts to invoke Article 50 using prerogative powers until prevented from doing so by the Supreme Court. I could discuss the woefully inadequate Notification of Withdrawal Act, pushed through Parliament with little debate to meet an arbitrary deadline, or the Prime Minister’s failed attempt to gain an overwhelming Brexit mandate in the 2017 General Election, or the saga of the non-existent Impact Assessments, but I will spare you my thoughts on these issues for now.

We are now just over nine months from our departure date, and the negotiations seem to be revisiting issues that we thought had been dealt with last year. Last week we had the drama over inserting some vague and non-committal wording about an end date to the backstop proposals for the Irish border, and the Cabinet are reported to be still debating which customs arrangements they want, even though neither candidate scheme seems to be achievable. Almost all of the benefits that were promoted before the referendum seem to have vanished, and even Nigel Farage has reached the point of denying that he ever said that leaving would make us better off. There are still some claims that “Trade Deals” will make it all worthwhile, but it is hard to believe that there are “Deals” to be had that can compensate for the loss of our current trading arrangements with and through the European Union. The surviving claims now seem to stretch many years into the future, with Andrew Lilico saying that we may feel some benefits in 25 or 30 years, and Lord Digby Jones saying that we will benefit after a hundred years. I’m not sure that putting that on the side of a big red bus would have helped the leave campaign much.

So my long rant finally brings me to a question for you. Do you really believe that the United Kingdom leaving the European Union will bring any benefits for me or my family? Will it bring any benefits for Gloucester, or for the United Kingdom as a whole? If so, what will these benefits be? What is the likelihood of realising these benefits? Will they be enough to justify the loss of economic growth we have already experienced, and that which is forecast? Will the benefits justify removing Freedom of Movement from my children? Will they justify the loss of highly skilled citizens of other EU countries from our businesses and public services, the sheer hard graft of migrant agricultural workers, and the tax revenues that all those EU workers bring? Or are we just following “The Will of the People” and hoping for the best?

If you cannot give me good reasons to believe that there are benefits from leaving the European Union that will clearly outweigh the vast costs and risks, then I urge you as a minimum to vote in favour of all of the Lords’ amendments to the Withdrawal Bill. I believe that the Government is busy trying to offer alternative amendments that commit them to very little, but these seem very unsatisfactory. I understand that you may feel loyalty to the Prime Minister, to the Government and to your Party, but the issues at stake are too important for party loyalty to be the deciding factor. If nothing else, I beg you to vote in favour of the amendment to give Parliament a meaningful vote on the Brexit deal. Simply allowing Ministers to impose whatever they have come up with, or giving the choice between a terrible deal and the utter chaos of leaving with no deal in place, is utterly inconsistent with “Taking Back Control” and is entirely unacceptable.

I apologise for the long email, but I hope you will understand that I had much to say​ "

Another house update. Seeing as how we live in a permanent state of building site, it seems only fair to share the occasional milestone, each incremental step we take towards an Ideal Home...

When we moved into this house, the bathroom was high on the list of 'must gos': A 40-year-old avocado bathroom suite, cracking floral tiles floor-to ceiling, ceiling paper hanging down in fronds, the ceiling barely able to support the downlighters I'd had installed during initial rewire. Most vile of all, the toilet waste was encrusted with limescale which meant it blocked on a weekly basis. Experience has taught me that the only equipment that would help unblock it was a pair of rubber gloves and, also, that manual evacuation of the toilet is, exclusively, a 'man's job'. Or so it seems.

But it wasn't worth doing anything about it until we had a spare bathroom, which was on the cards too. So we've only just done something about it.

Before. Really, quite ghastly. Even the panels on the side of the bath were missing, because I accidentally threw them out:

So I did some planning and design. Because I always do some planning and design:

And then I let Greg, Jacek and Maciej of Octopus Plumbing start ripping stuff out:

On the whole, this didn't improve the look of the room. Fortunately, it gave Maciej and Jacek lots to moan about (I now know Polish for 'right-angle', 'perpendicular' and 'wall of dogshit'). I don't know the Polish for 'bodge-job' because it's not in these guys' vocabularies. If they do anything, they do it properly, professionally and effectively. And curse about it, in Polish, you don't actually need to know the words. Can't rate them highly enough.

Jacek is the Lublin Bathroom King. Started with a dust-ridden, wonky husk of a room, squared it all up, plastered, raised the floor, boarded the ceiling, wired in underfloor heating, installed extractor...

Then tiled it, beautifully, as only a perfectionist can. Must drive Greg up the wall...

Finally, put a bathroom in it. Short of LED mirror at time of writing, as it was chipped - new one coming this week.

We are very happy. We now have two open-plan bathrooms. Doors next week, fingers crossed...