Visiting the plot last week, the snowdrops were out round the base of the hazel trees, and were beautiful. 2 pairs of swans came to look at us, and a lot of ducks.
This is a lovely spot, and we are looking forward to having our house here.
We are meeting Claire, Andy & Steve later this week, to finalise designs.
The house will be simple: the main feature will be a full-width living room with glass doors looking down the garden.

Designs

This is the view from the bottom of our new garden at the end of January, with all the geese foraging.

We have spent a lot of January thinking about designs and sending e-mails to Claire at Potton. Finally we realised that our ideas were running away with our budget (this happens a lot apparently!)
We knew that we wanted a house roughly the size of our present one, but designed to work well for us. It has to be pleasant and efficient for 2 people, and open up for guests. Our present house is about 170 square metres (without the garage) so we knew that when we'd drawn up plans at 200 square metres that it made no sense!
We do want a house that is as friendly to the environment as possible and the first 2 rules of green house building are: keep it small and keep it simple!

We are due to meet next week with Potton and with Steve, our project manager, and we think now we have a good idea of what the house will look like, but who knows what other ideas may emerge in the next few days!

We were sorry to miss the annual Denford play. Our new neighbour, Peter, is one of the "resident playwrites" and has written The Ballad of Moonshine Malone with Will Adams. We hope to be able to enjoy their offerings next year.

More in a couple of weeks.