The sculpting to make the slopes around the house less precipitous is effective but looks very bare and stark. It'll be turfed or seeded in a couple of weeks. 
The water from Well 2 (our Plan B supply), is slightly acidic. This makes it taste nice but the hot water cylinder (heated with water from the solar thermal panels and showing a cylinder temperature of 59 degrees in March!), needs to be made of stainless steel and all the pipe work has to be poly-plastic, as conventional, neat copper pipes would corrode. The red cylinder is the pressure vessel, which smooths out the waveform produced by the submersible pump in the well.
We'd been looking forward to this moment and yes, this first firing showed that the wood-burner draws really well, using its own air supply ducted straight into the base of the fire, through the wall. The top of this duct looks like something in tellytubby land and we'll have to make sure it doesn't get blocked by snowdrifts. The stainless steel flue brackets look really lovely.
Aha! So deer and rabbits don't eat daffodils.
We suspect that our long-suffering neighbours will be very glad to have the lane free of cars. One of the neighbours (who tells me he's lived in his farm for 40 plus years), walks up to the site every day, for his constitutional and says he'll miss the crack, when the builders leave. He's been a mine of useful, local advice. Another family, whose house is just across the lane, have been unhesitatingly and unstintingly generous and helpful, to us and to the builders. They have several children and the older boys have been fascinated by the machinery at work daily.
Jim the hedger, mulching the newly planted trees. The mixture of native species will take a few years to fill out but we are determined to re-establish a proper hedge boundary, here and to the northwest of the house. The old hedges had decayed and been neglected for years. Where parts could be saved, Jim and Dougie "steeped" them, which in Gloucestershire is called "laying" a hedge.
This gap in the northwest boundary hedge will become a stone and earth bank, topped with more new young trees. We hope the deer will leave them alone.
Someone else has commented that this view is almost ecclesiastical, which is what we think, too.
The sunlight on the newly waxed oak flooring is lovely. We were at the house on Easter Sunday and had the time to see the movement of the light throughout the day. We had to be very carefull with the flooring and walked around without our shoes on, writing down any defects that we spotted. Snagging is made much easier and shorter when there's someone like Joe overseeing every element of the build and picking up problems as they occur. Sometimes he anticipates them, as with the pressure testing this week, which showed that there is a slight leak. Joe had recommended sealing around the skirting boards but that wasn't in the specification and Lo, that's what the tester said is needed.
And suddenly, we have a driveway, levelish and wide enough to build a garage, when we can afford to. The cut-off wooden posts are to stop cars from rolling down the bank.
The next visit, we hope, will be for the formal handover of the house. It is exactly a year this week since the first building work started.
