Sewage is so sexy!

No, not an alien space craft

Left hand down a bit

Nearly there

And then you jump on it, like this

This is another of the newly levelled terraces, created for the burying of the sewage treatment plant. The old septic tank was deemed too small for a modern 3 bedroom house, so we decided to put this beast at the other side of the site, accessible across our own land, rather than via the neighbour's private drive. It is an active system, using aerobic breakdown by bacteria, to give a clear (but bacteria-laden) outflow, which will discharge into the stream at the boundary. We had to apply for a "Licence to Discharge" from the Environment Agency.

Just run that past me again...

Time for some sky hooks?

Peter outlining his uncertainty

The sliding glazed doors of our bedroom, which will give on to a small balcony

Double-rafters, for extra layers of insulation

At a site meeting in September, we noticed that the entrance lobby roof ridge appeared to be balanced on a cross-beam running across the gallery, a few feet inside the front door. To our surprise and concern, it looked as if this cross beam would bisect the open, wide, lofty space we plan. We'd asked for a modification in the orientation of this entrance a couple of years ago and hadn't seen an elevation or cross-section of how it would work. It's exactly at the point where the east-west and north-south axes of the house meet.
Returning to Bristol and studying the photos only increased our anxiety. Ten days later, we met the design team and the contractor on site to discuss this, by which time there were other timbers in place and we could see that the offending "stringer" beam wouldn't, in fact, be too visually intrusive. Plus, there are some positives (as is often the case), in that the complicated geometry of the roof structures which meet at this point means that there will be some very interesting, sculpted plastered shapes at ceiling height.