On second thoughts

Foundations Schmoundations – a retraction

We decided we actually would like to have some foundations. The structural engineer and building control somewhat insisted too – they thought that perhaps surrounding our floors with mud, and leaving the heavy stone walls free to sink and slide was perhaps not the best idea. So trenches 35cm deep and 20cm wide and ~100cm long (depending on bottom stone size) were dug under the walls, fingers were crossed and concrete was poured in – it was not cheap. But it was done relatively quickly and with minimal stress on our side, which is nice.

Now we should be able to dig out the floors and install new, modern, damp-proofed, insulated floors. As the house is currently colder than it is outside – this will be a very welcome change!

Digging out close to (and under) the walls gave us a chance to find where the existing drainage was connected. We asked for it to be maintained through the wall between the kitchen and the garage – we should have asked for a new, deeper pipe through, but aw well – probably not even possible. The existing pipe is a little high in the floor levels and won’t be much use to us when it comes to installing the new drainage channels – and also leaves us with a bit of a moat around our kitchen for the time being.

We still have our little trickle of water where the stairs used to be

After the underpinning was done, we had to prepare to have the floors entirely dug out. This meant clearing those 3 tonnes of stone from the floor along with all the other materials and junk that we’d accumulated. Wahey.

Some of those giant pieces weren’t going to be moved without some tactical leverage, so we got ourselves a new set of wheels:

A shiny new sack truck – painted to look like a child’s toy because you’ve got to inject fun into this job somehow.

I thought that attacking the job little and often would be the best method to complete this task. So I spent a couple of hours one weekend moving rock while Ethan was working on other things, and occasionally helping me with particularly large rocks that I couldn’t get onto the sack truck myself (or pull up the hill to the back garden). Then, a couple of days later, we went down for the evening and had a good hour or so making a substantial dent, until Ethan smashed his finger between two stones when taking one off the sack truck.

With him feeling quite stupid and queasy, and fairly certain that finger would be somewhat useless for a while, we went home. It ended up healing surprisingly quickly and well.

It wasn’t until 2 days later while sat at work that my back started to feel not quite right, and gradually got more painful throughout the day. So, with 6 weekends left to go before we no longer have a rental property to live in, I put myself out of action for two weekends. It’s slowly improving, but not sure when I should stop using this as an excuse to not do any heavy lifting.

Ethan soldiered on for the whole time, weekends and some evenings. And along with working on other parts of the house, he managed to clear all of the remaining stone (more than half of the initial pile), and other rubbish. I, meanwhile, lay at home, chilling out to the max, hopped up on ibuprofen and deep heat.