On Mar 14, 7:52*am, The Night Tripper wrote:

This is a largeish house with a fairly large garden, in decent condition but
in need of modernising. We'd all quite like to do this modernising work
ourselfs, but realistically it isn't going to happen.

That realism is difficult to arrive at, but I think you're very wise
to recognise this.

However where do you all live, relative to the house? Given my past
experience with larger building projects, I'm not doing anything that
involves contractors where I'm too far away to keep a careful and very
frequent eye on it.