Yep. hired a digger to grub out the drystone wall ready for rebuilding. Really enjoyable actually. The waller has said he'll start to build it between Christmas and the New Year.
On the builder side, we finally managed to get 2 to do proper quotes, and we've chosen one who tells us they can start in the New Year. Speaking to him after Christmas to get a date. I've seen their work before and really like the owners sensible and professional attitude.
So progress at last! 
It's a relief to have that sorted the day before Christmas - I know logically it's just a date on the calendar, but we've lost probably 18 months so far, of
purely waiting for people to do their job, planners who just completely ignored the statutory time limits, or solicitors dragging
very simple jobs out for extra fees or just simple inefficiency (so far we've had to pay 2 lots of other organisations solicitors fees as well as our own, and there's a 4th lot of solicitors to pay for the building society) Plus ground survey & testing (even though we know the ground is perfect for building, we had to evidence it), even an archeologist still to come during the build. Then of course all these months trying to get builders to quote. So the timing is nice (though 2 years ago we fully expected to be in our house by this Christmas!).
In truth it's got us down quite a few times and if we had not already sold our old house to help pay for it, I'm pretty sure we would have given up when we were just getting fobbed off for weeks on end or screwed over for extra cash. It's been embarrassing at times too - both of us have found people asking "how is the house coming along?" and we've had to explain for 2 years now over and over that we are "just waiting now for..." this or that person to do their job. After so long we even began to wonder if people may be thinking we'd just made it all up about building a house! What's kept us going is keeping in our heads the belief that one day it will be over and we'll be out of those peoples grasping reach and will have our dream home for the rest of our lives.
I would estimate that solicitors fees, planners, surveys etc have cost about £4000 so far, and taken along with the lack of builders quotes, added an entirely unnecessary 18 months+ to the process over and above the actual time the work should have taken.
So hopefully we will see the drystone boundary wall started soon, and meet the builder again after Christmas and get paperwork signed and an actual start date - that will be wonderful! I know there will be issues along the way, but at least they should now be "real" things, like stones, windows not fitting (seems to happen a lot on the self build forums) and so on - practical
real things and not just made up paperwork to make money.
Today I am working again on another spreadsheet - this time for the building society who want you to tease out the exact costs - so for example we know the total quoted roof price for the guys to do it, but the building society wants that teased out into the costs of slats, laths, leadwork, membrane and so on. What's interesting is we've had a proper costings company go through the plans, done a very detailed spreadsheet ourselves, and currently doing the building societies one - and they all come out at different sums! With the same data put in but broken in different ways and different contingency sums automatically added to the various stages.
On the subject of costings, just 2 nights work going through the internet reduced the materials prices by several thousand. Here is just part of the spreadsheet I created. This is using the Quantity Survey costs (mostly they used Jewsons) with what I could get by shopping around, and a column showing the savings - they really add up!
