Friday 31st July, 2009

A slight hiccup in the updates - unfortunately I contracted the piggy flu so have been rather under the weather and locked up in the bedroom to stop any spreading of germs! I did pop out for a bit of air when the girls were out and took a few shots of the progress so have included a few below as a final update for July. Normal service will resume for August!

As you can see - we have walls and a concrete floor...!!

You can now see how the glazed gable (the big opening at the end) will work looking onto the boulder - it should form a significant feature of the dining room...

And here's some of the lovely stonework that Steve and George are doing for us - we love it...!

And so to August...

Tuesday 14th July, 2009

Blimey, it's almost a week since I last updated this. Things have been a bit busy...here come the excuses! Anyway, the project has finally started to come out the ground. Hooray! Towards the end of last week, Steve started laying the "foundations". I say "foundations" because they just consist of a thin layer of concrete over the bedrock and look like this..

It was good to see the shape of the extension forming which gave a good start to this week as Steve was happily able to lay the very first block yesterday which clearly had to be a photo moment. :-)

One last thing left to show for today is a detail at the front corner of the house before it was concreted up yesterday - you can see the edge of some of the bedrock and where Steve has dug around it so he can concrete the hole. The whole extension will be built on this stuff - I don't think our house will be moving much!

Wednesday 8th July, 2009

Well, the heavy machinery has gone and Steve and George have been busy levelling the site to get some sort of level platform to build from. This is what it looks like after today:

As you can see, it's a big slab of bedrock that extends the whole site. To me, it looks a bit like a giant piece of liver in the ground!! (Although Alison told me to add that this is my view only and not hers!) It extends all the way across to the house and presumably extends underneath it. I guess our extension won't be moving much when built! (Not when it's built on so much liver!) ;-)

I also took this shot tonight of some of the lovely old bits of stone that Steve has put aside to re-dress for the extension.

This week will be more preparation and next week the building should start with the concrete slab over the bedrock and the start of the retaining wall for the bank. It will be good to see something growing out of the site, rather than tons of earth and rock being removed!

Friday 3rd July, 2009

What a week! It all started so simply with a bit of straightforward earth excavation. Then we hit a looootttt of bedrock so a bigger machine was brought in with a stone pecker which started hammering away at the rock. It was very noisy so apologies to the neighbours!

Problem was it wasn't up to the job and broke down after an hour or so. Time to call in the big guns..!!

This monster ate the rock for breakfast! So after 2 days of very loud pecking at least a foot deep of bedrock was removed from the whole site and the clearing and levelling could begin.

We now have a level site which Steve can finally start setting out the building from. (I'll show this on the next update). At least after all that work and extra cost we'll save money and time on foundations as we definitely won't need any!! Over the last week and a half we have had approx 200 tons of earth and rock removed. To anyone in Birchover reading this - we promise to make it all look good again and restore the corner to it's former glory. Promise.