A Step up in the Garden

Just for a change from walls, I have recently (almost) made a set of steps in the garden.  The need for these steps came from the desire to ensure that the house was never troubled again by the dampness caused by rising ground.  The photo (left) shows the garden as it was, with high ground and the old extension; the new steps are where the scruffy elder was growing, and go down about a foot below the old ground level. We took away the raised earth from beside the house last September (see this entry), and made a sort of lane beside the house with a two to three foot high earth bank.  A retaining wall is being built to keep the earth bank away from the house, and so the steps are needed to reach the higher plateau of what will be a lawn (in due course...).

These steps (right) have been made to last, using Thermalite blocks on a concrete foundation, and concrete slabs as the steps and risers.  The annoying thing here was that I tried to make 6.5 inch steps and the first one came out at 7.5 inches; I tried to correct this on the upper two steps and they still came out at 7.5 inches! Hence the top step, when done, might either have a smaller riser, or else I will be moving soil around to get a decent level at the top.  The blocks are easily cut using a sacrificial saw - I used one left by my builder last October.  However, I had another issue with cutting the concrete paving slabs.  They are REALLY tough, and I now reckon my design is over-engineered as I have taken the trouble to make sure that the slabs are properly supported, but now I don't think that I needed to bother as they are so strong. I've only tried a few cuts and found that my new grinding disc is already completely knackered.  So now my technique is to simply score them with the grinder on both sides, and then split them using a lump hammer and my 3 inch bolster - result!

The sides of the steps (and the rest of the retaining wall) will be faced with small bits of limestone to mimic a dry stone wall, except that the back of the stones will actually be set in mortar - probably NHL3.5.  I then hope to grow plants to trail down the wall from the top, some campion at the bottom and, perhaps, something actually growing in the wall itself to give that effect of a lovely Devon lane.  It's just a personal memory of childhood holidays there...

Front Lawn and Driveway

After all that's been done on this house in less than two years, you wouldn't think that I could have a problem over something as simple as cutting the grass.  The problem is storage - there is nowhere to keep a lawnmower, so until there is I don't want to buy one.  I used to have a sickle (inherited with the property) which kept things under control last year but somewhere this has been lost; I think I hid it so that my grandson could not hurt himself (or us!) with it, and now I cannot find it.  This was useful at keeping the weeds down, but is a bit labour intensive really.  Slowly this year the grass has grown to represent a moderate hay crop in some places; since the lawn I seeded in March has grown wonderfully, I'm puzzled as to why the old lawn has grown so slowly. 

Anyway, the solution was quite simple in the end - I borrowed my son's mower! This seems a small payment for the babysitting that I do (even though I do enjoy looking after my grandson).  His lawn is less than half the size of mine, so the mower had a good workout.

Of course, having done that task and made it look very nice indeed, only a day later Colin, my friendly groundworker, came and drove his digger over it.  Reason? At last my neighbour is having his driveway done, so very soon he will be able to enter the front garden through his own gateway and park on his own drive for the first time. On the right is a shot of the work in progress, with the mown lawn being abused and the first pile of three being prepared for the grab lorry.

The photo below shows the almost finished task, which has a lot more driveway than mine.  The old gap in the wall is on the left; I had my eye on the stone from the new gap but sadly his part of the front wall had been rebuilt at some time in the recent past using C*M*NT mortar, so it took a pneumatic drill to prise it all apart.  [I'm sorry that I just cannot bring myself to spell the C-word with regard to its use on period property.]  The result is that many of the stones are broken and unusable.  In comparison, my bit of wall came apart very easily last year - see this previous entry.  I'm not sure that it had any mortar at all apart from some recent c*m*nt pointing which was not very deep (or useful, of course).

There was a small problem yesterday when one of Colin's workers pierced the neighbour's water supply with the pneumatic drill - I think Colin was quite embarrassed by that! Fortunately it was on the right side of the meter only 18" away, and a groundworker has all the necessary bits and knowledge to fix that very quickly; no harm done.

Limestone Walling for Beginners

The wall beside the front gates progresses slowly.  This is not really because of the poor weather, as I have done a lot of work on it in this last week by second guessing the weather forecast.  The lack of speed is simply because building a proper stone wall is a laborious task which cannot easily be done more quickly, especially by an amateur such as me.  The new wall is hidden behind this fence panel (photo right) to the left of the front door, and extends to the boundary wall on the extreme left.

Before finalizing the design of this wall I did a fair bit of research to see what sorts of wall could be described as the local style.  Although this was interesting, I actually got confused as there were so many slightly different styles which I had never noticed until I took fifty pictures of various local walls!  I therefore settled on the obvious idea of making it the same design as the boundary wall that it meets, although I am adding on the top some coping stone which was removed from the front wall where I put in the driveway (see photo at the bottom).  The end of the wall has to be 17" wide as that is the width of the reclaimed cut stones with pintles for gate hinges (which I bought last year), and the lower one can be seen in place in the photo left.  As the coping stones which I have are 14" wide, the wall will have to narrow slightly both as it rises and as it goes further away from the hinge line. It also has a slight bend in it, which is why the courses look odd in the photo left (NB It is about 27" high here and still needs pointing).  The finished wall will be about 6 ft high at the end for the gate hinges (i.e. the left hand end in the photo), and about 8 ft long, so that I will have a pair of gates beside the front door, and then the wall will extend across to the external garden wall.  The soil rises as you get closer to the garden wall, so the height above ground will be only about 4 ft at that end; to aid security, I will plant blackberries which are growing freely here - they are really nasty so will be quite an effective deterrent.

I am using a 3:1 mix of sharp sand and Castle NHL5 plus a small amount of building sand for the mortar of the main structure; possibly I could have used NHL3.5, but I wasn't sure so went for the "eminently hydraulic" NHL5 (see the Mike Wye website for explanations!).  For pointing I shall use a 3:1 mix which I have already tested and made up, using local sharp sand and lime putty as this will give me a good match with colour seen locally.  I think I read somewhere that it helps a wall if the outermost mortar is more porous than the internal mortar.

Technically I am repairing the wall, as I found the old foundations of a brick wall whilst digging the foundations for this one.  I am embarrassed to admit that the foundation is comprised of concrete blocks as I want this wall to be solid and to outlast me.  I know that lots of old walls stay standing for umpteen years but I bet that the people who put those up had a lot more skill than me! 

It might not be obvious but it is essential that limestone is laid in the correct orientation: the strata in the stone must be horizontal, as this is how the sedimentary stone was formed; if you lay it on its side then the strength is reduced significantly and it might well split.  It helps a lot if you can lay each course using stones of a uniform thickness, and you should also try to use the thicker stones at the bottom of the wall (but that might just be to save lifting heavy stones up high!).  The shape of the stone is clearly important as well; I am building a wall of squared faced limestone by re-using old stones which are already essentially in the shape of blocks.  You can do a wall using rubble, which sounds terrible but means that the blocks are not squared and you probably have to use the natural face caused when the stone is split.  Even then, you still want to build it in courses, but they can go up and down gently with a varying thickness, rather than being in neat horizontal lines.

I am trying to make the wall look as though it has been there for ages by using weathered stone which looks grey rather than yellow, and the source of a lot of this was the driveway cut through a low wall (the right hand gap in the photo, right).  However, that only gave about 20 sq ft of stone, and I probably need 50-60 sq ft.  I have also got some various bits of stone which were lying around this property, plus some yellow stone from under the kitchen floor, plus some more grey bits found when digging the foundations for the extension.  More recently I had some good fortune when the digging of a soakaway in the churchyard two weeks ago yielded another 5 sq ft of lovely squared blocks which have dried out and look very good.  [Top tip: sodden limestone and bricks dry out very well if you remove all the earth and mortar, leave them outside (raised off the ground on some old batten) and brush it periodically with a stiff hand brush.]

One obvious reason for the poor rate of completion is that my own skills are limited - after all, like many other tasks on this house, I have never done this before.  Although I have a good idea of how it should be done, there is no substitute for experience.  Another reason is that the supply of stone is limited (and the stone has been spread over a good area of the intended lawn), which means that the choice of each stone is quite time-consuming, but pre-sorting the stone by thickness helps speed things up.  I try to choose all the stones for several feet of a single course before mortaring them all in as that seems to speed things up as well.  I do actually find the job quite satisfying; this is possibly due to my mathematical bent and my liking for jigsaws.  I also used to play Tetris and am good at packing the car for going camping.

My final reason for the slow progress is that it is very tiring work.  My elbows feel strained and I have been sleeping very well recently.  Hopefully I can make more progress in the next week or two, and I'll post details when I unveil the wall to the public!

Walls, Weather and the Olympic Torch

Since I last posted more than two weeks ago, I really have been trying to stop getting annoyed with the weather and just get on with the various walls which I need to build.  However, I have to report, just in case it's not obvious or you're lucky enough to not have been in the UK recently, that progress on walls has been frustratingly slow because since then I've only done about three days work thanks to our "summer".

One achievement is that I have done a good bit of work on the second wall end in the front gateway of the driveway.  This was an essential precursor to doing the main wall beside the house as it needed to have first choice of the available stone in order to match the rest of the wall.  It isn't finished or perfect but I am quite satisfied with it.  Its public position means that it gets more attention than I might like and it will still need more work such as setting the coping stone.  The weather has been so bad that I've not even taken a photo yet, but will do so soon.

Such is the rarity of decent weather that I recently had to choose between using a fine day to maximum benefit by doing more walling or going and see the Olympic torch which passed nearby.  In fact, we were living in London not far from Tower Bridge when the Olympics were "won" in 2005 and we decided then that it would be a good idea to have moved out of London before the event happened.  Somehow one knows that the public disruption will be quite intolerable for those residents who have a reasonable desire to actually work almost as normal.  You won't be surprised that such is my level of enthusiasm for the Olympics that the wall won and I spent a productive and tiring afternoon doing half a course of the wall beside the front door.   

OK, yes the Olympic torch passing is a once in a lifetime event, but there are many other things I wish that I had done in my life, and I have learned to have few regrets.  One thing that I do still regret was when Concorde was returned to service (in 2002 I think) after the Paris accident; passenger numbers were low so they were offering a day trip to New York (with one way on Concorde) for £1,000 but, even though I could have afforded it, I persuaded myself that there would be other opportunities.  Of course, when they suddenly pulled the plug less than two years later, there were no good deals then!

Finally, I should record the first anniversary of our actual move into this property.  This causes me firstly to ask where the year has actually gone?  There still seems so much to do and, as far as I am concerned, relatively little seems to have been accomplished of what I expected to do (but when I say this, Jane says that I shouldn't be so hard on myself).  I know I can't blame it all on the weather.  Once you are actually living in your house, the priorities all change and I have deliberately told myself that I am retired so what is the hurry?  I still refuse to have a huge list of tasks as that would be too depressing, but I do try to decide at the start of each week exactly what I'd like to achieve in that week; however, that brings me back to the vagaries of the current weather...

Walls and Weather

Well, I could go on about the recent weather, but you know what it's been like.  What I find really annoying is when the forecast is for weather which is a lot worse than the actual.  This can really mess up one's plans for the day, when you want to work outside, using cement or lime.  You find the day is unexpectedly sunny when frequent heavy showers are promised; yet when you check the current forecast on the BBC for your own specific local area, you find that it's still showing heavy showers.  So what will happen in the next couple of hours? Do you dare risk it?  I think that they are covering themselves with that symbol of a black cloud with raindrops and sunshine; basically they haven't a clue!

I have managed to out-guess the forecasters a couple of times.  I have started the garden wall foundation (parallel to the western wall of the house, about six feet away, holding back the higher ground) and have done the foundation and the first real bit of wall on the wall beside the front door.  There's also a new bit of concrete where the wheelie-bins will be stored.  Sadly, this is now the height of summer and I have barely started the major outside jobs that I had been "looking forward" to doing; apart from the walls and concrete leading to the patio area, there are a large number of sash windows which need refurbishment while it's warm (if/when?).

I've also done the promised run to the scrap merchant; the brass was £2/kilo (not bad...) but the ferrous stuff was down to 11 pence/kilo which was a bit disappointing considering I took 246 kilos in my car!  When he weighed it, the scale said 445 kg which almost excited me, but that weight was because it had all been put in a large (and heavy) metal stillage.  At least there is now a bit more room in the garden as I've also done a run to the council tip this week.

I mentioned (here) about the limecrete floor being laid in the church opposite; here's a photo of the finished floor.  This is just the choir vestry, where there was extensive damp, rotten floor joists and horrible smell!  The stone is Creeton Silver edged with Creeton Blue limestone (from Ancaster, I think).  Before you ask, no, I don't know why honey coloured stone is called "silver".  There's now a French drain and new soakaway being done outside in the churchyard, as well as re-pointing and leadwork.

It's all expensive but it's the necessary long-term solution to ensure the structural integrity of a Grade I listed building which will still be here long after I've gone. Once again, I'm reminded of the proverb "a stitch in time saves nine".  This is so true of old buildings - if you don't look after them properly then one day you (or your successors) will have to repair the unnecessary damage and pay out many times what you saved in skimpy maintenance.

Reclamation and Recycling

Whilst contractors were working here, I always tried to keep the place tidy.  Now, with some contractors this was impossible (see this entry, for instance, or this one), but in general I managed it. At times it almost got too much for me, especially with the way that most contractors just throw the rubbish down without thinking about it.  I used to pick up nails and screws on the scaffolding and I was delighted to supply a hundred copper nails once to keep work going when the roofer ran out!

Simply separating rubbish and scrap made a huge difference to the general tidiness, and made it much easier when I went to the scrap merchant.  These visits have made me a bit over £350, most of it from lead, but there is also a good satisfaction at everything which does not go to landfill or free to the council tip. A lot of old wood was burnt outside, and then more was used on the woodburner in the winter; a pile of old (untreated) rafters and batten still awaits a similar fate next winter, together with the remains of the trees from the front garden.

One particular thing that got recycled were the 10 litre tubs for the lime mortar and plaster we used for the plastering.  I had to get all this in tubs - we couldn't even get the 950kg pallet of 45 tubs onto the pavement so it had to be left in the road; then they all had to be moved inside by hand without delay. (I once had a much cheaper 950kg bulk bag and almost broke my back putting that into tubs just to get it inside...)  Given that I probably had 13 or 14 deliveries from Mike Wye, you can see that I had well over 500 tubs plus lids; these tubs can be quite useful, but if you're not careful you end up with dozens of tubs filled with hardcore or rubbish to be taken to the tip.  I did manage to send a couple of pallet loads (see left) back to Mike Wye for a small rebate but that really was hard work for little reward.  Consequently, when we moved in, I got a recycling bin and started putting 15 tubs and lids in each fortnight!  Long job, but we're there now.

During this project I have found a great deal of satisfaction in re-using items, and the list is now quite long.  The first thing was a bit of 3"x2" oak ceiling joist which I cut out to make the loft hatchway; within 30 minutes this had been re-used as a replacement for a section of the adjacent wall plate which had rotted (due to the prolonged roof leak).

I did numerous repairs to the structure of the house, using (as appropriate) old bricks and stone found around the place.  In particular, some of the stone which I used to fill the old kitchen doorway (under the window, photo right) was found just inside under the old kitchen floor where it had been the foundation for an internal wall.

Although I replaced the old 2.5" cast iron downpipes with 3" (to match the wider 5" gutters which I considered necessary), I was able to re-use two sections of the 2.5" for places where it didn't join to the guttering, one for the bathroom outlet (where the old piece was cracked lengthwise) and the other on the extension.  Both were wire-brushed and painted copiously with Hammerite.

The LBC said that I had to re-use the old door furniture on the new front door, but apart from the (original?) doctor's knocker, that was not feasible - the knobs were from internal doors and the 4" letter plate was far too narrow for modern use. 

The new extension has several re-used items.  Most significantly Jane and I reclaimed 1800 bricks from the demolition rubble (and only had to buy about 200 more to match), whilst the chimney is topped with a yellow pot from the original back chimney (this chimney pot spent a year acting as the kitchen rubbish bin!). The old internal ledged and braced door to the utility has been refitted at the other end of a new wall in the same position, with the original Suffolk latch fitted, and the redundant external ledged and braced door is also repaired and repainted, ready to be fitted to a pair of pintles on limestone blocks which I bought at the local reclamation yard.  This will be one of the pair of back gates; the other matching door/gate was obtained as a swap for some old glass (thanks JohnB) and is already fitted.  Also, as I have mentioned before, the casement window in the extension was a major repair which I did myself, utilizing part of the frame of the replaced front sash window, plus some old wavy glass from two broken sash windows.

Of course, we had to buy a lot of reclaimed Welsh slates for the roofs, but we did re-use what we could, although that was a pitifully small percentage.  Another reclamation yard purchase was the almost new sash window in the extension (on the left of the photo, left) which we bought for £95 including delivery - absolute bargain!

So, I'm now working on the garden walls, again using (free) stone from around the site, including the weathered stone from the front wall where the driveway now goes.  Next week I'll do another run to the scrap merchant with the last load of brass and iron, including the old Crittal door and windows.  Then, when I have also built the stone wall (using the stone from the front wall where the driveway was made), the garden might look a bit tidier.

Rain, Rain, Rain

I asked the other week why we British always talk about the weather.  Well, after the rain of the last week I think I can now answer the question - it's because the weather is so b****y awful.  April and May were bad enough but I think we all thought that the heatwave at the end of May heralded the start of summer.  Wrong!  I have managed to get a small amount of work done outside, but nowhere near as much as I had hoped.  Right now the rain has eased but it's all muddy underfoot in my garden builder's yard and everywhere is dripping.

What I have achieved is to make a deep concrete plinth (right) on which to mount a cast iron lamp-post, and I've laid a concrete foundation for the wall beside the back gate, together with some block work where the wall itself will be buried in the slope of the garden (no point in burying good faced limestone!).  Although they seem small, these two structures together consumed a whole one tonne bag of ballast!  There is just the small matter of the wall itself to be built, plus 14 yards of foundation and retaining wall for the garden beside the house.

Mind you, I have been very busy on other things in the last ten days.  We had a church 1950's party which had to be held inside as it was so cold (quite apart from the occasional shower) and we've spent some time looking after our dear 17 month grandson.  Firstly we took him (without his parents) to a large family do in London where the sheer numbers could have fazed him, but he survived remarkably well and we returned home as proud grandparents (although we also acknowledge our age and consequent tiredness).  Then we looked after him for a whole day at our house, when he was cheerful, fun and communicative (and we got even more tired!).  He has reached a reasoning point, where he can work out a problem for himself.  For instance, he has been known to push a chair to the kitchen work top so that he can climb up onto the work top!  The other day he stood near our front door and then at me and asked to be picked up.  It then became obvious that he only wanted to be higher so that he (or I) could open the front door as he knew the latch was well out of his reach.

I have also recently received direct from the publishers a copy of a new Haynes Manual called "Period Property - care and repair of old houses".  This was especially good because it was free: it contains some photos of the limecrete floor in this house.  Then the author, Ian Rock, came to see this house as he was so interested by this blog and wanted to see what had been done to the house. [Edit - they now have a website http://www.period-house.com/]

A Genuine Jersey Holiday

It has been a bit quiet here recently.  This is partly due to a general malaise on my part, partly because I have been doing odd little jobs which aren't worth reporting, and most importantly because we have just had a week's holiday in Jersey.  This was our first overseas holiday in almost four years, so it was about time!

Jersey is interesting.  Many buildings are made of granite, and they seem to care more than my local council about the old look of the place, especially away from St Helier.  In consequence, there was a lot of work being done by local builders using granite, although I suspect not with lime mortar.  Actually, since granite is (I think) not porous like limestone, I'm not even sure if lime mortar is as necessary as it is with limestone.  There was also a significant amount of concrete work in evidence, much of it dating from the German occupation in WWII.  They used slave labour to fortify the place against an Allied invasion which must have been a huge drain on their resources; however this was totally wasted as the Allies had not the slightest intention of invading the islands.  One of the still useful legacies is a high sea wall (built to prevent tanks being landed) which goes all the way along the five mile beach at the west of the island.

If you are thinking of going to Jersey (as a tourist rather than occupier!!), I advise you not to go in July or August if you want to drive around.  The roads are small, junctions have poor visibility and parking can be difficult.  I think that the roads and junctions are deliberately never improved as the maximum speed limit is 40mph (and can often be 30 or 20!) and so the road design is effectively a cheap means to regulate traffic; if you have an accident at those speeds, it is probably rare to even injure someone.  The road signs leave something to be desired; they seem to fall between UK and French standards, so often a junction is signed in advance but not at the junction itself.  The parking would have been tiresome in the peak times, but we were able to park quite easily, even in St Helier.  These things were not really a problem in May, but we kept on asking ourselves "what would this be like in August?".

Our visit occurred during the Jersey Food Festival; we spent the only really wet afternoon in a posh hotel watching and tasting cookery demonstrations (and I tasted my first oyster).  A simple food I now love is the boiled Jersey Royal potato - delicious with butter.

One place we visited was Jersey Dairy Ltd - see photo of their new factory right.  They are effectively the only exporter of dairy products from the island.  (My thanks to Eamonn the MD for the tour, the free ice-cream tasting was great!)  One little-known fact is that under current rules the Channel Islands are not protected by labelling regulations, and so if you have a single half breed Jersey cow in your herd anywhere in the UK, you can sell all your milk as "Channel Island milk" or "Jersey milk".  Apparently most supermarkets use this ploy on lots of dairy products to confuse consumers, which seems a bit underhand but is quite legal.  To avoid it you should look for a little logo which says "Genuine Jersey" (and I think there's an equivalent for Guernsey); this logo IS protected and means what it says.  The Jersey cows on the island are registered and protected in order to maintain the purity of the breed, unlike on the mainland here.

By the way, we also visited a farm: the Jersey cows are ever so sweet and friendly!

Why do the British always talk about the weather?

It's a British stereotype, isn't it?  Put a group of Brits in any social setting and the standard way to break the ice is to start a conversation about the weather.  Being British, the odds are that the conversation will not actually progress much past the weather.  If the group were French, American, Israeli or African, the odds are that you wouldn't leave until you had shared your life stories and been invited to stay should you ever pass near their home.  (I met a couple from Hawaii recently who gave me their card and said that I must drop by if I ever go to Hawaii!  Being Americans, I reckon they meant it, but I doubt that I will take them up on it.)  But we just talk about the weather.  Nice day, isn't it?  Hasn't it rained a lot recently?  Last night was a bit parky.  What's the forecast for tomorrow?

I think a lot of it is that we are just not used to sharing personal information verbally.  This seems odd, considering that most people seem to be happy to share all sorts of stuff with complete strangers on the internet (which I personally reckon is pretty unwise).  The weather is always unpredictable and seems a safe topic of conversation; when I was younger we were not allowed at family mealtimes to talk about cars, work, school, sport, religion or politics, which pretty well left the weather as the only topic!

So why am I writing about talking about the weather?  Well, I have lots of work that I'd like to do outside and haven't been able to because of the weather we've been having.  Right now I have stone walls to build, concrete and paving slabs to lay, plaster to mix (for inside) and things to sand and paint.  I can't really even tidy up the extension as most of it has to go in the shed which is on the far side of a sea of mud (which is where a lawn might be next year).  I made a start yesterday (Friday) by finishing one end of my low wall beside the drive and starting the foundations for the wall beside the front door, but there's a long way to go.

I now realise just how good the weather was last year, as I was able to take my pick of jobs according to priority, not according to the weather, and could do lots of messy jobs like sanding doors outside in the sun.  The only good side of it is that the grass seed which I sowed in hope during March has come up well - the irony is that I decided not to lay turf as I thought that the hosepipe ban would mean that it would dry up...

Another Limecrete Floor

A slight diversion from our house, to the church across the road where they are in the process of laying a limecrete floor in part the church.  This is noteworthy as all too often ignorance wins and a concrete slab gets laid, or the flagstones are sealed (so why bother with a breathable floor underneath?). I found a year ago that there was very little detailed guidance on-line when researching the design of our limecrete floor, so I make no apologies for giving such detail here again.

The church architect got the design of the floor from Ty-Mawr, who are one of the main lime suppliers in this country (I used Mike Wye but there are others...).  The floor design is basically the same as the one I laid in the kitchen here (see this post last year), apart from using Recycled Foamed Glass (RFG) instead of light expanded clay aggregate (LECA).  In detail, from the bottom up, there is a geotextile membrane, 200mm of (lightly compacted) loosefill aggregate of RFG, another layer of membrane, then a 3:1 mix of RFG and NHL5 to form the slab (I think, 150mm thick).

The slab has now been laid by The Limecrete Company and looks impressive (right).  The edges have a vertical inch thick piece of woodwool, whose function I have yet to understand but it might be related to crack prevention.  There will be underfloor heating (UFH) pipes added with a 3 inch Glaster screed and 20mm Creeton limestone tiles on top, although this heating will not be connected until a new boiler is fitted in a later phase. This work is the second stage (of about four!) of renovating the church; phase 1 was electrics, lighting, sound and internal redecoration.  The next phases will also include installing toilets and a servery, and levelling the entire floor with the same sort of floor with UFH (and chairs instead of Victorian pews).