Every morning all the windows have very heavy condensation running down them and pooling on the sills inside due to the moisture levels in the house. The plaster will take a while to dry out (2 weeks for the modern plaster, many months for the lime plaster…) and until then this will happen. It is so bad I have to mop it up from all the windows with a bath towel. This morning I’m amazed it hasn’t frozen!
A very cold morning with a heavy frost, but thankfully it has stopped raining.
Dan is fitting the piece of elm underneath the toilet to make it level.
He has made this out of three bits in fact, one at the front and two either side, this made it easier to calculate and make as neither side was the same thickness. Once oiled to match the floor, this will disappear.
Tom and George are a little drier today, but back on the hateful job of digging solid, heavy clay out of the trench.
George’s mud mountain is growing. It has almost filled the garden!
Skip change day! This should be the last skip we have… we hope… We have filled 8 skips, this will be number 9 and they cost £245 each…
The boards covering the holes in the pavement are just about holding. When the last skip is taken away these holes will be filled and repaired.
It looks like a beautiful Summer’s day! It isn’t though and Tom has had enough of digging trenches already. It is bloody hard work.
They have started digging up the driveway, which is (very sadly) made up of broken up old flagstones, cemented in place. This is also bloody hard work.
Dan needs oak for the window seats and door architraves, so we return to Doug Hutsby’s place to source some more. The really wide ones that we want are of course underneath a pile of extremely heavy boards, hence bringing Dan along.
We find two perfect 1.5 inch thick boards (at 15 foot long and over a foot wide – hence also bringing Dan and the van) for the window seats, but also some narrower and thinner 1 inch boards to use for the architraves around door frames.
The land drain will be feeding into a drain at the front of our neighbour’s property (the house we are currently renting) as it is the only drain in the vicinity. Previously our down pipe (which took the rain from both our roofs and our other neighbour’s roof) was feeding all the water, via a pipe running above ground, across our drive and onto the road. This is definitely not the way to do it, but there was nowhere else for it to go!
Trying not to make too much of a mess in our neighbour’s immaculate garden…