The End of the Old Extension

 
Well, a week is a long time in building.  It's Friday and the last eight days have been most productive, as it was only the previous Friday that we demolished the old extension (above and right).  My trusty friend Chris came to do this task, accompanied by Dwayne (or Duane?), as Shane has broken his leg quite badly in a motorbike accident.  NB The brickie (see below) is called Shaun so I'm in danger of getting confused by these young men - well, I reckon they are young as they are half my age.

After all the hassle about our proposed new extension, everything has been refused and I just want to repair rebuild the old one "as is".  My original intention was to leave a large part of one wall including the chimney, although this would have made the foundations a bit difficult.  Having unintentionally got permission to demolish the whole extension, I decided to do it as per the permission as that would make the whole task much easier.  However, this meant that Chris had to demolish the tall chimney, which proved to be quite well built.  I won't post the photos of this as it would only generate a lot of comments about health and safety.  Suffice it to say that he did it safely and we were most relieved.


The rest of the extension was in a worse condition than we realised, and it took less than seven hours to reduce the whole thing to separate piles of bricks and wood (photos above).  Jane and I then spent the whole of Saturday sorting, burning and tidying as the apparently spacious garden had quickly assumed the role of an untidy and very crowded building site.

On Monday the groundworkers Colin and Ryan arrived with the digger (right) and dumper to clear the site and reduce the level of the topsoil and concrete which has been the Achilles heel of this property for decades.  When we first saw this house, there were two distinct problems: the water falling on the house and the water coming in through the high ground all around it.  We tackled the roof first, but now almost a year later it was great to see a start being made to rectify the high ground issue (caused largely by adding layers of concrete up to the side of the house!).

Huge amounts of soil and rubble were removed, piled in the front of the house and taken away by the 18 ton grab lorry (left). This did five trips over the next four days, so it was probably almost 90 tons removed.  This is hugely more cost effective than using skips.

Tuesday was a special day - the (expensive) archaeologist was coming at 8.00am to observe the digging of the foundation trenches.  She hoped to find a mediaeval grave or two, while I stood beside her hoping for exactly the opposite.  I'm pleased to say that I won!  I had also booked the Building Control Officer (BCO) to come at some stage to agree on the required depth so the whole process was a bit fraught but it all turned out OK.  Then to my surprise the ready mix concrete turned up that afternoon and we poured the foundations as well (photo right)!  Colin does not hang around.

On Wednesday the oversite brick and block work was done (i.e. up to damp proof course level), and more soil was removed; on Thursday the base and Celotex was laid for the floor, the old drains along the side of the house were removed (plus the soil on top!) and new plastic pipe was laid up to the existing inspection cover near the front.  The old soil drain is just visible in the photo left, running up beside the new block wall.  Getting rid of this was a nasty smelly job as there was not much fall on the foul drain...  Lastly, on Friday morning, more ready mix arrived for the floor, and the job was done, although the lowering of the inspection cover near the front will wait until we have finished the extension.

NB I wrote most of this on Friday but didn't post it until Sunday, partly because on Friday I fell asleep watching TV at 6.45pm!