Since every newspaper, magazine, TV show and media outlet is doing its Highlights of 2015, I thought we should have a review of significant moments from the Cuil Bay blog in the past year.

.

It certainly has been a significant year- we’ve gone from foundations to an almost entirely finished house. So here are some key blogs from the last year – not the highlights, as many class as barrel-scraping, hair-tearing lowlights.  But I hope you enjoy them nonetheless.

Number 1: 2015’s most popular blog

By about a million miles, the letter I wrote to the CEO of Openreach while trying desperately to aquire a phone line, has been the most popular post on my blog. It resulted in me getting my own personal customer service assistant who called me daily to check how I was, and a phone line at the end of a few weeks, so it had the desired effect.

 

Number 2: Highest High

Written in a moment of madness when I was feeling overly happy. It didn’t last long, but it was worth recording for posterity. The agonys and the ecstasies 

 

Number 3: Lowest Low (well this is one of very many of them)

…and this is why the ecstasy didn’t last long. Discovering two pieces of metalwork that presumably should be in your house does that. The mystery of the missing metalwork

Number 4: Survival skills and escapism

It’s been stressful building a house, and having a busy job, and having a family to keep in some kind of semi-organised harmony, so I’ve needed some strategies for survival.  There’s certainly loud music, runs in wild places, swims in wild seas, and dancing at my personal silent disco. In fact rediscovering some CDs of 90s rave music has seen me through the very worst of it. There’s also the sofa, wine, iplayer, and an extremely understanding husband. Sometimes writing the blog helps, but one thing I’ve done quite a bit of this year, and have wanted to do for ages, is spend time sleeping out in the mountains again.

 

Up in the mountains and in the woods. It puts the rest of life into perspective. Here’s a blog from a sleep in the woods where I discovered that, unlike sleeping on top of a hill, the deep dark wood in a storm is a simply terrifying place.

 

 

Number 5:  Discovering a good pun is almost as good as a sleep up a mountain in a storm to make you feel better.

If I hadn’t had a sense of humour about all the horrors then life would really have been irretrievably miserable. Here is something that made me laugh for a week (I don’t think you’ll find it that funny though….) EPC Difficulties

 

Number 6: A vlogging debut

I struggled long and hard deciding whether to post here any of the video-blogs that I did during the build when the awfulness of the situation had crippled my ability to write.  But, no matter how toe curling they are, and no matter how un-cool my hat, I felt I should represent one of them here. So I hope you enjoy this blog: Weather nightmares, Articulated lorry nightmares, Crane nightmares and Sartorial head-wear nightmares.

 

Number 7: Builders

Here’s another blog that is slightly toe curling for me to read, one of a series I did on builders. To quote from the blog …

It’s difficult to reflect on the house build in this blog without sounding, even to myself, like a hopelessly trusting naïf. Sometimes, in the cold light cast back by retrospection, my decision-making seems verging on the self-sabotaging.

And I certainly have made my mistakes, but I have been fortunate to find a builder that has managed to sort out a lot of problems. This blog about the windows was only one of those mistakes. There were others, even bigger.

Numbers 8 and 9: The rest of my life

But it’s not all been about house-building this year. I’ve had my job to do and I’ve had a lot of fun to plan and excecute. I’ve managed a few blogs on that stuff too.
Work and fun coincided on a trip to Ailsa Craig and this blog finds me on a shingle beach at midnight sitting by a loudspeaker blaring out the most extraordinary sounds: A night of Storm Petrels

 

And of course there’s always skiing adventures to be had when the nights start drawing in and the gales drift the snow enough to venture up a hill. I share my pontifications on that peculiar sport here Six skills for Scottish Skiing

Number 10: Kat’s final house blog

But the build isn’t over yet. It might seem very neat that it is the end of a year and the (nearly) end of a year of building the house. But my number 10 blog hasn’t been written yet.

 

It’s going to be the blog where the house is done and I have a house-warming resembling the parties at the end of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s River Cottage series, with an aspirational community gathering around a giant bonfire where I roast home grown food and everyone is having interesting and highly intellectual chat about how to save the seas, or school dinners, or something like that.  Or it will be like the end of one of Nigella’s programmes where she whips a bowl of cream between her bossoms and serves choux pastry to her family and friends in a fairy-light strewn garden and everyone is charming and beautiful.  There will be a mild, hazy light, flowers on gently rolling banks, trestle tables laden with edible goodies and everywhere happy friends, happy neighbours and happy builders architects, plumbers, electricians, joiners, and the rest. There will definitely be loud music and it will be loud very very late.

 

But, that blog is still in my head, and I have to hold it there until everything is actually done.  And that is the hard bit.