Gosh, I can’t believe it’s being 3rd of April since my last post. Sadly, we’ve all experienced this crazy lockdown and Covid-19 together. I sincerely hope you and your loved ones are staying safe. We’ve also had big setbacks with our house build.

Our main contractor informed us as we were emerging from lockdown that they were going into administration and subsequently liquidation. This was a huge blow to us given we’d had the enforced shutdown due to Covid-19. From our perspective, Covid-19 is a Force Majure situation that you can’t do anything about. In any case, working with our design team and surveyors, we started exploring what options were available to us.

The original plan was to move in to our house by 3rd of August 2020. We’re now looking at Spring 2021!

We explored a few and realised that the main issue we faced was getting to weather tight before the rain sets in at the beginning of autumn. Given we’re in the South West of England, the rain here is insane once it gets going at this time of the year. It’s such a shame we lost three-four months of golden sunshine we had in the summer that would have given us uninterrupted build time.

On that basis, we explored a couple of options effectively a mini tender and settled on Bentley Projects who were responsible for building the superstructure. Our supply chain was broken anyway, we had to work together as a team to complete key design, initiate procurement again, re-engage with vendors we’d already being engaged with for the build.

They include, steel frame, SIP(Bentley Projects had responsibility for SIP), doors, windows, ground source heat pump, solar tiles, elements of the groundwork, kitchen, bathroom and entertainments.

The initial lead in period was intense for all parties and we’ve made great progress. However, as expected the rain is upon us now and we’re going to have to duck and dive to get to weather tight by end of November.

I’ll follow up in my next post with some details of where we are.