The new concrete base in the old house is in, ready for insulation and underfloor heating.

It started at Easter, with the roof coming off first. So naturally I was predicting a biblical deluge all month long from that moment. Miraculously instead we have enjoyed a month of nearly continuous blue skies and summer like heat.

Our main contractor Stevenson Building Contractors Ltd have made amazing progress in just a few weeks. We chose Stevenson because everyone in the area recommended them, plus they have a lot of experience installing the whole range of eco-measures in big Cotswold retrofit projects.

The front roof was off and back on again in record time, and in unseasonably sunny weather.

We are salvaging as much as we can, including the old Water Tank still hiding in the loft.

Stevenson Building also came with a reputation for suggesting practical design solutions in situ, when dealing with the unexpected problems inevitably uncovered during the works. And this quickly turned out to be useful.

We struggled from day one to visualise the new upstairs dormer spaces from our architect’s plans, because the hipped roof meant that usable head height space is not the same as floor plan space.

New electricity and water supplies go in.

First fix plumbing is already going into the old house.

Now I am an unreasonably tall bastard, which meant once the work was underway and our builder could get into the new space to measure up for real, we could either have a wide dormer (lower down the hip) in which I couldn’t stand up, or a narrower dormer (higher up the hip) in which I could!

The net result was we lost 70cm in width. That’s just over two school rules, which you might naively think, like me, doesn’t sound like very much. But it meant our bathroom could no longer fit in our bathroom, a potential disaster.

Foundations for the new timber frame extension have been dug.

Fortunately Stevenson suggested a tweak to our upstairs layout, which we could now stand in the shell of and draw out with chalk, and the day (and our bathroom) was saved.

The rear dormer shell has been built, the old extension demolished and the new extension foundations dug (see above).