Progress with the Building Work

There has been a lot of progress on the building work in the last month, with the builders returning in early January and finishing off the roof of the porch. The new windows were installed on the 14th, and the photo below shows the porch in late January.

The door is actually the old back door, which is just there temporarily until the bulk of the work is done, as the builders didn’t want to risk damaging the new one whilst they are still taking lots of materials in and out. You can also see the new flue for the boiler going up through the roof, as the boiler has now been moved to its new position in the entryway.

Once the windows had been installed, the builders were then able to take out the front wall of the existing downstairs wet room, to make the entryway one large area. The photo below shows the view towards the front door from the kitchen door. The area on the right hand side is where the WCs will be going, and you can see the base of the divider wall between them.

The changes to the back wall of the property have also been done, and below is a picture before and after the changes.

The patio doors in the meditation hall have been replaced with a window, and the back door moved to the other side of the kitchen. This means that the previous back door location could be made into a window for the room at the back of the garage conversion.

The existing window in the meditation hall has yet to be replaced, but that will hopefully be happening in the coming weeks, when the remaining windows in the house will be replaced too.

The builders have also been doing some things in the existing house, including taking out the chimney breast in the common room. The photo below shows how that part of the common room was set up before the work began, as well as what the empty room looks like with the chimney breast removed. This will give us quite a bit more space in the common room, and will hopefully help to make the room warmer, as there had been an open fire with a flue in it, which was a potential source of draughts.

Work on the inside of the garage conversion has been progressing well, with all of the timber partitions put up by early January, and the electricians and plumbers putting in the wires and pipes in the following weeks. The builders have now done quite a bit of the plasterboarding and plastering, and the photo below shows the back room, which has a view out to the garden.

The new stairs have also been delivered, and the builders are hoping to install those in the coming week. The new position of the stairs will mean that people don’t need to go through the meditation hall in order to get upstairs, which will be a big improvement. It should also help with heating the meditation hall as well.

Whilst the work is being done we are planning to screen off the bulk of the meditation hall with a temporary wall of plastic sheeting, so that we can still use the hall for events whilst the builders work at the back of the hall and in the stairwell. Trying to cover everything in the hall every day, and then remove the covers for each event that we have, would take a lot of time and effort, and probably wouldn’t work all that well to protect the hall either.

Forthcoming Events:
Festival of Avalokiteshwara Bodhisattva

On Saturday the 6th of February we will be celebrating the Festival of Avalokiteshwara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. The name Avalokiteshwara is Sanskrit (Japanese: Kanzeon, Chinese: Kwan Yin, Tibetan: Chenrezig), and means “The one who hears the cries of the world”. To live with compassion is to hear the cries of suffering within ourselves and within all beings, and to be willing to respond, and the festival will focus on this centrally important aspect of Buddhist practice.

Usually during the festival, a wide variety of different images of Avalokiteshwara are placed around the walls of the meditation hall, and we circumambulate the hall and bow to each image as we pass it. This symbolises the fact that compassion can appear in many different forms, sometimes in a way that we least expect, and that if we want to know stability and contentment in our lives we must accept, and bow to, all these different appearances of the nature of reality. This is one way in which we ourselves express compassion for all living things.

We will be holding the festival over zoom this year, so we won’t be able to do this in the usual way. However, we will be adapting the ceremony so that we keep the spirit of the festival, and I hope you will be able to join us from wherever you are. Full details will be sent out by email to Lay Sangha members prior to the festival.

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Donations

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