10th September

More tedious and time consuming remedial work on the old part of the cottage.

Here, I've levelled wood around the perimeter of the lounge. The screeding board will run across this when  the concrete base is poured. Later, this wood will come out and the drains at the bottom of the tanking material will go in here. Sand blinding is compacted to protect the dpm under the concrete.

In this photo the concrete has been poured. I've also hacked off all the old plaster on the walls - although it created several tons of rubble (which conveniently buily up the level of the patio) it has produced a fairly uniform wall base on which to lay the tanking membrane... ordered this today - Oldroyd XS.
On the floor will now go 75mm insulation and a 75 screed with water pipe under floor heating in.

Close up of the condensate drain that runs around the room's perimeter. There are one or two access points should it need to be rodded ant any point.

Spent a day or so drilling the joists in the lounge ceiling to create lateral wall restraints. These would you believe are meant to hold the wall up, not to stabilise the floor. Steels rods are epoxyed into the good stones in the wall (not many of those).

Meanwhile Joc has been in her element creating steps to the garden from the patio area. Some of the windows have been fitted too. The final door and two windows are due in tomorrow.

Today someone from Severn Trent came to inspect the water pipe we'd already put from the kitchen to the boundary. He wasn't happy that he couldn't tell what depth it had been laid at (despite showing him some photos), and also that it was too close to a drain in the road... so I spent much of the day digging a hole to the pipe (900mm), placing a peep hole in the form of an 800mm length of soil pipe and moving the water pipe to one metre from the drain. Lots of back breaking digging! A labour of love huh?