Its been a pretty quiet summer here, as most summers are in the building trade. We’d had some time off; Lewis has gone to Lewis and I’ve gone to Orkney – nothing tropical for us (not while the pound is worth less than an old crumpled Drachma) and both trips were pretty relaxing. The past few weeks seem like years as we have been solely doing warrant queries across a wide range of projects, from Type 23a Bothies to a £3 million industrial scheme. It is an endlessly frustrating experience and takes an inordinate amount of time – I’d like to loudly blame the local authority’s building standards departments for this - but it’s not their fault that their budgets have been slashed to preserve front line services. I wish someone further up the chain would realise how damaging it is to the economy to have projects tied up in a woefully underfunded statutory approvals system. In the meantime, we’re just getting on with it and beginning to prepare for our next round of projects for technical design. Most of them are starting on-site in January 2019 and are shown below. These consist of a very big house, a big house, a holiday lodge and a bothy – all of these projects are now in the detail design stage; I’m trying to find the elusive balance where all of the office’s projects are at different stages. Elusive.