14th May 2003

WE HAVE PLANNING CONSENT! WAHAY!!!! Finally after 8 weeks and 1 day we have our planning permission passed! The only condition being we have to make the new works look like the existing works ie granite stone on the front and plaster and paint on the back - think we can manage that! The architect is now drawing up the building control plans which hopefully should be ready within a couple of weeks (although I'm not overly hopeful of that on past performance!).

May (in general)

After alot of 'what are we going to do when the builders start as we cannot live here' my Mum (who still isn't sure why she agreed to this!) suggested we move in with her while the works are being carried out. I originally presumed that we would move straight in with her when the baby arrives in October (ah yes, forgot to mention that - our new baby is due on the 7th October 2003!) but after talking about it we decided it would be more sensible to move in before the builder starts in July. Kelvin wants a couple of weeks to demolish the house (sorry demolish the bits that are coming down - bathroom, kitchen and internal wall) so we provisionally said we'd move the 1st weekend in July, however, that is one of the few weekends that Mum is not going to be there so the move was brought forward to the last weekend in June (hey, I like this!). We are putting most of our furniture into storage as we need to get it out of the house and plus Mum needs some of her furniture in storage to make room for us. Therefore we will be taking out storage the weekend of the 21st June which is fine except it is Lauren's 6th birthday party that day! What we are hoping to do is hire a van on the Friday evening and load up, make a few trips on the Saturday morning to the storage unit and then have the birthday party - mmm think we shall be pretty tired by the end of it! Ah yes you are thinking - how are you going to manage for furniture for a week before you move?! Well, we shall be sitting on garden loungers in the lounge! We shall be eating off of our laps on the garden loungers in the lounge etc etc I think you get the picture! We also need to buy and transport a sofa bed to Mum's house as she has kindly given up her bedroom for us and she is going to sleep in the lounge but this has to be coincided with packing up Mum's sofa in bubble wrap and taking to the storage unit. This is going to be fun I think........

May - a conclusion

It feels we have actually achieved something this month with the arrival of the planning consent. It has been a long time coming! Having got a builder in place who appears to be reliable in his starting date and who we know (he carried out some work for us in our old house and we were very pleased with the outcome) and we are quite happy to leave him to get on with it, it seems we are finally getting to the good bits. Although we are not totally stupid and expect the work to go without problems as I'm sure things will arise that we haven't even considered yet!