What a party! What a night! Saturday 16th July

Its been ages since I have posted in the blog and this post marks our penultimate post of the blog.  The final post is planned to be completed photos of all the rooms on loft and first floor.

To celebrate the end of our renovation project and to thank all our friends that had helped us along the way we decided to throw an end of build celebration party or House Warming Party.  G and I wanted to have some fun surprises for our friends and came up with two ideas.  One was a mock awards ceremony with a PowerPoint presentation with all our friends helping out on site.  The other idea was to have a plaque fitted on the final roof beam of the house to mark the topping out ceremony for the loft extension.  This is a tradition amongst builders to have a ceremony to mark the last and highest roof beam to be fitted.  Its normally done at the time its fitted but as we were so busy at the time of the beam being fitted and far more concerned with getting the roof and getting our home watertight it never happened.

We spent time on Saturday with me making spoof awards and writing the presentation. For example Mogsy won the award for spending the most time on the building site and doing the least amount of work and got a miniature bottle of wine with a label on it saying 'Is it wine o'clock yet?'  We decided it would be fun to have an unveiling ceremony for the plaque so G's spent time making some paper curtains to place over the plaque for the official unveiling.  The photo below shows the plaque on the beam.

It was a small party with the everyone there  having had a part in the build at some step of the way.  After everyone had arrived we filled their glasses with champagne for our topping out ceremony in the loft.  The funny thing about the ceremony is that where we had placed the plaque is where the beam was exposed in our en suite bathroom.  So all of the party had to cram into the bathroom for the official unveiling.  G called me forward to be the person to pull the string attached to the curtains to unveil the plaque.

When I did I was stunned to see underneath the curtain was a sign reading...

Grin City!

I can't really put into words how amazing it all was.  I could hardly speak at the time and it was a while before I stopped crying and managed to nod and eventually say yes!

So our end of build party turned into an engagement party and later on disintegrated into a untuneful Karakoe session. 

End of Build/Engagement/Karaoke Party

G told me afterwards he thought getting engaged  would be a wonderful way to start the next chapter of our lifes now that the current chapter is over and I couldn't agree more.

Rainbow ring