Scaffolding, and the Driveway again

As I write, it has all gone quiet outside.  The scaffolders are here removing the scaffolding, but I think after 30 minutes work they have decided it's lunchtime so they have downed tools.  Mind you, these are probably the same wussy ones who didn't put it up (see "The Rebuild Continues") for fear of a bit of rain, so I shouldn't be surprised.  Why turn up at 12.30 and then stop for lunch 30 minutes later? Why not have lunch first and then

Roofing and Tree-Felling

Well, we slated the roof last week, which took longer than I thought it would.  After Saturday doing the insulation and battens as reported in my last entry, I spent a day and a half (Monday and Tuesday) doing as much of the tiling as I could on my own as Chris hadn't shown me how to do soakers at the edge. I covered an area with diagonal edge from the base of the wall up to the level of the rooflight, which I reckon means I did over half of the total required (photo right).  I also fitted the rooflight myself before Chris came on Wednesday and we then spent a lot more time doing not much slating; the window was tricky to secure due to

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!

Slight Progress Again

I've been enjoying the last few weeks, in a lazy fashion.  Planning for the "service wing" re-build is still a major pre-occupation; sorting out the contractors is now almost second nature, and quite easy when you use the same ones!  (I must have done something right the first time as they are all happy to do another job for me.)

However, there is still a planning issue with the County Council's archaeologist who is interested in our footings.  I think we can get round all that, but it means that we will, after all, have to pay for a professional archaeologist - another thousand or more down the drain.  I should point out that Jane is actually quite excited by the thought of an archaeological dig on our own property.  I think I would be as well, were it not for the expense and the delay (as winter is rapidly approaching).
 
Recent work has been slight; the fireplace people came back to install our woodburning stove (left), with which we are very pleased (although of course we haven't actually lit it yet!).  The whole thing is a huge improvement over the fire and floor which used to be there (below right, obviously, although it didn't actually slope).  They have also just fitted a cowl on the chimney above the decorative arch fire which they fitted in the lounge; this had to wait until the bird's nest was empty.  They did NOT have much fun clearing it - there had been a considerable effort by the big black things (I was never exactly sure whether they were crows or what) in completely blocking up a chimney which was swept only last November.

In preparation for emptying the "service wing" for demolition repair, I have purchased and erected a small (7' x 5') garden shed with a pent roof (i.e. a single slope, not an apex).  The next task will be to fill this!  NB I have it on good authority that, although we have no "Permitted Development Rights" in this conservation area, this is still legal as it is less than 10 cubic metres in volume, so we don't need any permission.

Apart from finishing off around our new double sash window, I have also been tiling in the kitchen, using 10cm square tiles.  If you've never used these, they are quite tedious to put up, being so small; I much prefer the 25cm x 33 cm ones we've used in the bathroom as you cover the space so much quicker.  Another disadvantage of the small ones is that it is very easy to get out of square, especially on uneven lime plaster.  (I must hasten to point out that I am not criticizing the plasterer's work, but rather just pointing out a fact of life in old buildings.)

Gas Men and Holes in the Ground

After reaching the take-a-breath stage with the plastering, the gas man came this week.  The house has no gas (although next door does) and so they had to fit a new gas supply pipe from the road up to the side of the house where the kitchen will be.  This is quite a long route, and I am grateful that the surveyor stretched his tape measure to do it all for no extra cost.  He was well aware of the issues about not fitting unsightly meter boxes on listed buildings, and had had this debate with his own company many times before.

Of course, when the manager came last week, he had a different idea about the required route, and then the actual workers had their own variation as well.  They have to dig two holes and then use a tool called a mole, which operates on compressed air and burrows under the ground from one hole to another.  In fact, for our property they had to dig five holes and join them up like a dot-to-dot picture.  Then at either end they dug a trench for the connections to the main and the meter box.  This may sound easy and in fact they made fairly light of the issues, but I reckon I was right to be worried about the difficulty of the possible routes.  The job took over two days, and so one night the road was partly blocked by these works; Jane said, "I've never had a road blocked for me before!"

I dug a hole where the meter was to go, partly as I wanted to know how deep the "foundations" of the house were.  The answer was about a foot from the current surface!  In this photo you can see the three bottom courses of stone, which sit on a line of stones laid at right angles, sticking out about four inches from the wall.  It looks as though they laid these longer stones across ways, and then just built the wall on them.  I think this bottom level was pretty much the ground level when it was built.


The gas men found a old wall, in the gateway near our front wall but about a foot into our property and about a foot down.  Despite the availability of local limestone, this wall uses a good amount of granite - where did that come from?

The existing wall is at the top left of the photo, heading down, and the older wall is in the middle just above my toe, highlighted by the low sun.  There was also a possible mediaeval tile fragment as well as a few other bits of pottery, but clearly everything there has been disturbed over the centuries and is out of context.  However, overall, we think it shows that our house is on a very interesting bit of ground (in the archaeological sense), and now Jane wants to excavate the entire garden!