The weather was not a lot of help to us when came the time for the insulation and the underfloor heating pipes to be laid. It is impossible to do this when a forty mile an hour wind is blowing, but once this had died down, the next day all the piping was laid ready for the cement.

The day arrived that the concrete floors will be laid. Unfortunately there was a chance of rain and so a plastic ‘tent’ had to be built over the exposed areas. The cement turned up in a lorry and because of the location it had to be wheelbarrowed into place. Three guys did the barrowing with one doing the levelling out. It apparently was a very frantic day. I have to say apparently, as I was out for the day at a training course in Kirkwall so I missed most of the fun! Anna tried to keep the cats in as much as possible so we did not end up with paw prints across the new floors, this procedure was not totally successful but at least the cats were kept off whilst the floors were very soft!

The next day ( Thursday ) Ross and Graham started to put up the new walls and one of the first was the new office wall with the large window in it. This looks better that we had imagined the view is going to be great ( once the dumper truck is moved! ) Anna got very excited when she saw how the window will look. The same day one of our local farmers, Tommy Bain turned up with someone we hadn’t see before. He was Kevin Critchlow and is a dry stone wall builder, he came to take a look at the collapsed section of the wall by our garage. This wall had fallen down between the time we viewed the house and when we moved in. It is not an urgent job but it will make a nicer entrance to the place, we may even get him to build some other walls in the garden.