Roofless.

Monday - Beginning of week 9. I don't much like Mondays at the moment because on Mondays I'm at home with our 2 year old and I'm doing 'Mummy things' like taking her to a music group and making Yorkshire puddings and waiting for that hour she goes to sleep at lunchtime so I can make phone calls about matters more pressing than Postman Pat and/or his flipping black and white cat. I've got showers to order, garage doors to consider, quotes to chase. I realise this makes me a bad mother, but the situation is temporary and in any case, it really is very difficult because I can't even go into the build because I can't risk the stress of taking her in there with me. Keep. Calm. Carry. On.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather last week - 24-27 degrees at the end of September and the roof went on with barely a hitch. I say 'barely' because the porch roof was removed and couldn't be replaced because the joiner and structural engineer realised it needed some sort of metal thingy to stop the new roof from collapsing - and that's got to be fabricated.

So the porch was left exposed all weekend, which was fine until yesterday when it rained all afternoon and evening and our recently-delivered letters sat exposed to the elements. A woman would never have made this mistake - she'd have thought through every possible thing that could go wrong and top of her list would have been a porch without a roof. I rang the builder's wife today ask her to talk to him about the porch roof before my new textbooks arrive from Amazon and suffer a similar fate. It's good to have at least one woman on the job.

Anyway - progress on the house today - The scaffolding was supposed to come down but didn't - I think it's taken root and we'll have to put up with it. The joiners were busy hammering down the flooring upstairs, which means you can now actually walk around the new first floor. I discovered this by chance when I called by to collect the post - Mike the project manager invited me to go and have a look, which left him 'babysitting' my younger child while she sat in the back of the car (she's not allowed in the house since, as you know, she's always looking for new and interesting ways to kill herself and the house currently offers several options).

As I walked upstairs I could see that the main bedroom had now been split into two by a stud wall partition to create bedrooms 4/5. 'You're not going to put the other stud walls up today, are you?' I asked the joiner. ''because they're not in the same position as they are on the plans.'

The looks on their faces told me they were about to do exactly that.

'So where do you want them?'

'I haven't got the exact measurements. Dr B has been plotting the rooms out - I'll ask him when he gets home.'

'And the airing cupboard?' they asked

'Not in the same place,' I replied.

Bloody good job I popped in. Good job Mike told me to look upstairs, good job he was on hand to 'babysit' the car so I could go into the house. Living away from the build has obvious advantages, but not being on site every day is potentially much more hazardous.