Five months later...

And we have a builder! I won't bore you with the entire saga of builder 3 and 4. Lovely people, both of them, but we just couldn't afford number 3, and number 4 could build us a house for the right price, just not the right house! If we'd been happy to do it all the way he wanted i.e. cornices and architraves and concrete floors on the inside, and rendered brick and a tiled roof on the outside we would have been fine. The trouble is that we don't want rendered brick walls, tiles on the roof and bloody fussy detailing around every skirting board, the ceiling and every door. No, no, NO!!!!

Then, amazingly, builder number 5 - Warren Macdonald - came charging in on his white horse to save us. Previously he's been the builder's builder, the one others referred to but said we wouldn't be able to get him because he was too busy working on a smart local development. In fact the owners of the smart local development had warned us off, saying Warren was theirs and not to be contacted except for general advice! But in the current financial situation it seems that people aren't buying into smart local developments and so Warren has less work on with them than anticipated, so although we'd only asked for his advice he offered to do a full costing. Et voila it came in at a price we can - just - afford.

The next hurdle is the bank... Once we've finalised things with Warren and come up with a contract we can go to our bank and ask if they'll lend us the money. If we're successful there is a chance we could be starting the build in June or perhaps July... which gives us an outside chance of being well and truly moved into the new house by this time next year.