We took these photos on 3rd November. It was a glorious sunny day and made us feel good to be up here!

On the house side things have slowed down a lot due to me working, but I have managed to lay laminate flooring in the hallway.

   He normally perches on a fencepost but this evening he decided he could get a better view from the roof. Not surprisingly the house martins that had designs on building a nest in our eaves have been put off and fled the scene.

 In the meantime we have been busy building the deck. We ran out of boards because at the last minute we decided to make it bigger, but that will be remedied this week and we hope to be able to enjoy the sun with a barbecue this weekend.

What can 2 guys do in one day? Paint an entire house. They started at 7 and didn’t stop until 4.30 – when they had finished. It took 65 litres of paint (9 buckets) not the 21 litres it said it would take on the tin, but was worth it for the quality of finish. Whoopee.

The team of Harlers, all from Hungary with only the boss speaking English, (he drops them off in the morning and picks them up in the evening) started Wednesday. By Friday we are ready for a coat of paint!

It has taken us forever to find someone to do the job without charging the earth and talking about it being a 3-4 week job. These guys really know what they are doing and just get on with it.

If we want to communicate I go on to Google translate and type the English in. It translates to Hungarian and I print it off for them to read. Works for me!

Well,we have been busy. I am almost finished with the garage roof, but the wind is gusting up to 40mph today so I have taken a break. Meanwhile Angela has been busy tiling the en-suite shower cubicle, helped occasionally by May, who has mainly been keeping us well fed and watered. Angela will finish today and I will upload the finished shower room later today. We have also had all the materials delivered for the harling (rendering) which hopefully will be done next week. Given the long-running saga of getting someone to do it I am not counting my chickens.

It was hard work, especially as it was yet another blustery day  – not really the conditions to be putting 8ft by 4ft sail boards on the roof – or waterproof material that just blows everywhere and never stays where you want it to. Thank goodness for staple guns, that’s all I can say.

We just need to put the corrugated sheets on, fit the side door, make a window and fit it, build the garage doors and fit them, render the whole thing………so why do i feel as though my work is finished?

The garage is now coming along after I spent a day building blocks and making trusses. We finished the blockwork and put two trusses up on Sunday. I have put breather paper on the gable end and cut the OSB board to go on the gables. We drove into Inverness to buy the OSB board – the nearest Wickes! By the end of the weekend I am hoping to have a roof on.

May has been busy on Gumtree, buying white cement and harling chips at cut prices. All we need now is someone to put the stuff up.

At the moment it is lack of money so I am working hard to earn some so that we can finish. Hence the slow progress.

However, we now have a gate, we have finally swapped over the front door to what we originally specified and the garage grows slowly. We are also actively seeking out someone to put the white-wet-dash on the house. Hopefully the next photos will show something quite different.

First there was the pesky job of putting a drainage gully at the low point of the drive and providing it with a soakaway. We dug a hole 1 metre square and 1 metre deep.  Then we had to fill the hole with all the random stones we had dug up over the last year.

And we have made a start on the garage. That’s another 300 concrete blocks to lay  And we have finally found some topping stones to finish off the wall. Thanks to a kindly neighbour who had some going spare.

Meanwhile May takes a break to count the daffodills