Remember those giant rocks we were taking out of the wall upstairs? We finally got the hole down to first floor level. The amount of stone that came out of this wall was baffling. See me atop my mountain! I have to climb this each time I want to make some tea or coffee; the tea making station is situated on the only flat surface of the downstairs, the window sill:
I’m not sure we’d even be able to fit this stone back into that volume of wall if you paid us. And we’d really like that money with the money pit this house is turning out to be! According to our calculations (volume x density of granite) we’ve removed about 3 metric tonnes of stone, including the stuff from the loft. The pictured pile isn’t all of it; there are other heavy ones that we REALLY don’t want to move across the room to this pile, as well as bags and bags of chunks of mortar, dust and tarmac – because who wouldn’t put tarmac in a wall? Answer: anyone who knows that tarmac is highly compressible.
Here, have some progress photos:
There were a few moments when Ethan and I weren’t sure about taking out certain stones – convinced that gravity would surely prevail and bring down more than we wanted, and on top of our heads. But we proceeded on Ethan’s dad’s advice… and thankfully no rock slides, not even a crack in the pointing. Maybe one day we’ll learn to trust.
Only two stones convinced us all that they would really cause a problem. Thankfully, one was mostly below floor level, so we cheated and just cut off the bit that stuck out. The other was close enough to the floor that we could remove everything else around it. We’ve left this one in the wall until we are ready to immediately start rebuilding the wall. Behold – a “finished” hole!
Camera one 
Camera two – Charlie for scale
It isn’t pretty yet, but it’s door sized! We can finally once again get to the bathroom without climbing through a window or a hole high in the wall! Thankfully, Ethan’s dad has built a substantial number of stone walls, so we are lucky to have him to put this wall back together again (and to have helped us take it apart)! Although, perhaps if we hadn’t known anyone with any experience in things like this we would never have gotten ourselves into this project.
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