New house (2016 Q1) and workshop extension (2016 Q4)

We lived in Vancouver, Canada for 4 years before moving back to the UK in late 2014. It took a while to settle back in, as it's not easy to do simple things like rent a house, get a mortgage etc. As you (and the UK government) know, most returning expats are actually money laundering dru9 dealers, so their activities have to be very carefully monitored - and indeed severely limited for the first year or 2. Finally, in early 2016 we managed to move into a  house of our own. 

When house hunting you tend to have a wish list of perhaps 10 or so features you'd like but life is compromise so you end up missing out on a few of them. In this case we found a house with no workshop and just a tiny single garage. No problem - we'd kept some dosh back to address this. Of course, it meant we wouldn't have anywhere for my workshop contents for a while yet.

The extension took about 3-4 months to complete to the point that we could retrieve the stuff we had been storing at my mother's house in Harrogate. We got the bulk of the construction work done by a local builder, with me finishing the second fix electrical / plumbing / painting etc. It's not entirely finished but now we have a dining room, utility room, toilet - and reasonably large workshop.

I fitted 6 decent sized LED battens, almost 30 sockets (using a dado system) and (so far) 2 large radiators. It's all double glazed, with cavity wall construction and plasterboard. It has its own consumer unit and at some point I will connect up the 63A sockets that will power the welders. I've painted the walls up to about the 8' level and given the floor 3 coats of pukka industrial floor paint. Not entirely happy about the actual concrete floor itself but there's not much I can about it now. I can honestly say that being without a workshop for 2 years was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. However it's over now - woohoo!