Dan and his assistants have achieved an amazing amount this week, in spite of some unhelpful spells of rain. The excavation work started on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday, with all of the trenching except that for the garage completed. This included digging to below the level of the old septic tank chamber which was at the house end of the garage, and which necessitated a very wide and deep trench across what will be the front of the house. On Thursday morning we received this photo from our rather surprised neighbour-to-be, as a concrete pump big enough to build a skyscraper arrived at 8 o'clock. Over the course of the day, 10 deliveries of concrete went through the pump and into the trenches. Given the tightness of access to the site, the narrow roads through the village and the fact that the deliveries were stacking in order to ensure continuity of supply for the pump, it's amazing that the crew seems to have kept of all our neighbours onside. We popped by just after lu...
So it has been a year and a half since the last blog post. Yes, I have become lazy about updates and yes, the last few things have been completed. Well not quite - we still need to have the labels removed from the velux windows, and I need to sort out the building insurance policy, but to all intents and purposes we are there, and have been for the last few months. We had waited a while for Pat to sort out the last few things. The replacement skylight had been leaning against the container tor the best part of a year, the lovely stone walls remained uncapped, and the pedestrian path from the gate to the front door remained unfinished. In the end it took an email following the death of a close contemporary to elicit a response from Pat, and then things happened quickly. He had struggled to find someone whose work he trusted to finish the epoxy gravel path. Sadly we were away when the work was done, but we were very pleased with the result. We were also away when Pat capped Andy's st...
I popped over to the site at lunchtime as Dan had said that he would start the trenching today. He had a midi digger and 9 ton dumper truck there and had got on well with marking out and digging the trenches for the back of the house. We understand that he and Pat don’t regard the septic tank chamber as a particular problem: their solution is to ensure that the concrete of the garage foundations goes deeper than it, then fill it in. We had a detailed response from Adrian to the discovery, which as he suggested I sent on to the structural engineer yesterday morning. I haven’t heard back but wonder if he and Pat have spoken. This evening we went over to see if the time lapse camera put in place yesterday had worked. It takes an image every 15 minutes during daylight from the back corner fence post and has indeed done the trick. We think Dan’s assistant is standing between the dining area and the sitting room.
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