Walls up

The builders have managed to get the walls built up this week, he's really happy with the progress he's making, and so are we.

He thinks he should had the roof on by next week and make it all watertight, so going great guns at the moment.

Pictures of the progress so far below.

Foundations are in!

So it's taken 3 months but the foundations are finally in!

The piling company came yesterday and put in the cages, which you can see below, which have anti-heave under them. It's basically glorified polystyrene. They then proceeded to fill all the trenches with concrete which set overnight.

We had to lock the cats in to make sure we didn't have half a kitty sticking out of wet cement.

Anyway, very happy to have that all out of the way, so onward and upward now with the build!

Piling

So the extension is about to start again after a brief hiatus.

The piling contractors came today and brought all their machinery for the next few days of work. They made a test hole 8m into the ground, using a boring machine.

This is going to form the base of the foundations in order to combat the issue with the tree next door.

Fingers crossed nothing else comes up and the extension will be done before Christmas.

Garden Turf

So before we start on the next big project on the house, renovating the kitchen and bathroom, we wanted to get the bottom of the garden sorted out and turf it, as it had really overgrown with weeds. The picture above might look pretty, but those are all weeds.

So we weed whacked these all out, cut down a dead tree and removed a tree stump. Over a few weeks, we then got a garden services company to come in and poison the roots and prep the area. I then installed the new garden fence just before they started. This is what it looked like after the first day.

And this is what the finished product looks like, garden turf laid and down! We're very happy with how it looks. The guys over at Mr Green Gardening Services did a really great job. 

We just have to water it loads and make sure that it doesn't flake out. Shouldn't be too hard with all the wet weather we've been having in the UK.

New Garden Fence

It's been a while since the last update. I thought it would be nice if I showed you all what we're up to in the garden.

So Paul and I have put up a new garden fence. I took a few days off work and we have removed the old wire fencing and put up some treated feather board. It actually went a lot faster than both of us were anticipating and we managed to get it up in a day.

Here's what the final product looked like:

We're also having the garden turfed soon so I also have been doing some work on get that ready. A little jack hammer was involved on breaking up the path to make room for the grass:

Nursery Wall Pictures

Finally got our animal prints up in the nursery. They're from Mrs. Booth, the eco friendly animal collection - colourful pictures for kids printed on recycled paper using vegetable inks. She has a whole range, so check them out. We got the elephant, giraffe and owl (below).

Also put up some vintage style owl hooks up for hanging things on, like the occasional pooey nappy! Put a few behind the door too. All ties in well with the room's theme.

Elephant Wall Stickers

We wanted something to go on the walls in the nursery that had a child like quality to it, but nothing that went around the whole of the room.

Lu found some stickers that we both liked of some elephants. Naturally, they weren't from anywhere close and had to be ordered from the Antipodes, Australia to be exact.

The company is called Vinyl Design and they have some great wall stickers so check out their website. Really like how it turned out. Especially Lu's clever idea to use one of the ellie's above the mirror.