Today we got the boiler fired up, and the heating running on the first and second floors. There's still more to do on the plumbing, but it felt like a major milestone to actually heat the place up! I intend to give it a longer run tomorrow to see how the building envelope performs in terms of heat retention.
A while since the last entry... we've now taken delivery of £4,500-worth of Spacetherm, for internally insulating the front wall (see article for a more detailed description). As the delivery was on an 18-tonne truck, we had to decant it into my 3.5-tonne van in order to get as close as possible to the house. The contractors are using their joiner to fit the Spacetherm: a slightly curious choice, but makes sense given that there's some difficult angles around the bay windows, and cutting the stuff neatly will be half the battle.