Put it down to a learning experience !

Well its mid -January and progress is slow.

Demolition is complete. Big lessons learnt there. Despite following the council conditions to the letter - we still got it wrong. Slightly upset the planners as we had not got the conditions signed off. From our perspective all the conditions had been met in full before demolition and nowhere did it say that we had to have an email back from the council saying that the conditions were discharged. But those are the unwritten rules - that we now have learnt.

So we are now about to start building - except we cant as we havent had the conditions discharged for the building work. Anxious not to get it wrong again we wait patiently - despite having submitted all of the paperwork and details in mid-January. Its a real pity as we have builders standing twiddling their thumbs and the weather has been pretty good. It will probably add a couple of months to the completion date that we had in our minds.

Lastly, its hard to operate a small business in Wiltshire without a good broadband connection and where we live in the middle of a field we will never get a good one unless we pay for the cabling ourselves. So a leased line is on order - 3 months of waiting so far - and we've just found out that BT Openreach think they will have to close the road to do it - another 90 days to get permission from highways to do that.

So its all good learning and a long waiting game !!