August 23rd

Bodge, bodge, bodge. That's all I seem to be doing at the moment.

I suppose it was always going to be like this when we came round to getting the old part of the house in order. In the last few days we've been trying to get the window openings ready to take the new windows, the floor ready in the lounge for pouring concrete and the fireplace safe: it and the wall above were very close to collapse - the end pier of the fireplace literally fell out. After building new walls inside the fireplace, drilling and epoxying steel rods to support the pier, casting a concrete back and sourcing some oak for the lintel, we now feel it's a solid as it's going to get.

The underground pipe will supply air directly from outside to the woodburner. Geting the combustion air directly into the stove will help keep drafts at bay. 

Shuttering around the window opening and getting concrete inside was a tedious and time consuming job, but at least now the window will fit.

Both the air source for the wood burner and the soil pipe for the bathroom exit under the old doorway. This doorway will be 'bricked up' and so we had to use pre-stressed lintels above the pipes and cast in a concrete platform.

All the walls in the lounge will need to be 'tanked' - a dimpled plastic sheet is laid up the wall to about 2m and this is turned into a drainage channel at the base of the wall so as to collect any condensates. This complcates hugely the concrete slab we plan to pour next Wednesday, chiefly because we need to create the channel within the slab and it needs to be between the wall and where the dpm  rises from under the concrete. Said channel needs to be on a suitable gradient and then discharge condensates outside through a new hole in the wall. Fun huh?

All this 'faffing' and 'bodging' is a far cry from when we built the extension - everything seemed so 'pure' and 'perfect' back then. Me, I'm going to build a house from scratch again next time.