While almost all of the building work was completed before the end of 2025, there were a few items outstanding which have been attended to over the past couple of days:

• The rainwater drainage inspection chamber in the North-East corner of the Courtyard (top-left of the overview photo) has always been holding 30-40mm of water – implying an inadequate ‘fall’ on the outlet pipework.
  • The fall was checked with a laser level on Tuesday, which confirmed the chamber was set at the right level and pointed to some sort of issue on the downstream pipe run.
  • Excavation of that pipe run showed there was a ‘hump’ in the pipe which was causing the issue – partially due to it passing over a separate underground pipe connected to an Aco doorway drain.
  • With the pipe run re-routed away from the other pipe and re-levelled at the correct fall, the rain is now draining out of the inspection chamber.
• The ground in the Courtyard has always been prone to holding pools of standing water – which was evident before construction started. As a consequence, a network of ‘land drain’ pipework was installed, formed from four ‘legs’ running east-West (which will end up in the middle of future planting beds).
  • The expectation was that there would at least be no standing water in the immediate vicinity of those land drains – but that wasn’t the case, and in fact there were some pools of water directly above the drains.
  • The issue turned out to be the use of solid clay as the back-fill material over the land drain pipes – and in some cases inadequate pea gravel over those pipes.
  • The agreement with the build team was that they would remove the layer of clay overlaying the land drains and top-up the pea gravel cover over the pipes to the specified 100mm depth – and then I will fill the trenches with some more free-draining soil from elsewhere on the site, as part of the work required to prepare the soil between the drains for planting.
• Some other finishing touches that happened to be scheduled for today were for the windows and doors.
  • One of the window handles was from a faulty batch, and the lock cylinder kept falling out – so that handle was replaced (from a new, good batch).
  • There was some install-time damage to one of the door handles, which was also replaced.
  • The original window sills turned out to be too ‘deep’ to fit properly so those were re-made and fitted today.
  • A minor manufacturing defect on the bi-fold door meant the bottom seal had been torn – and would be torn again if one of the hinge fixings wasn’t adjusted, so that hinge was re-fitted and the seal replaced.