Week Thirty Eight – The Joy of Underpinning - Again

Heart warming, spine tingling, exhilarating, exciting moment this week. Well, a pretty good moment.  The scaffold at last starts to come down. Exterior work on the roof the walls & the windows is done.

Now the scaffold is out of the way we can get on with the garage and plant room. Have to start by moving the heap of rubble from the area where the garage and plant room will be built. More hardcore dumpering called for.
Heard recently that Garage is the soulful branch within House. Be that as it may, no garage no house - all the heating and water purification equipment as well as the electricity meter and distribution board are scheduled to go in there. So we'd better get on with it.

And here the heap isn't. Before we start building the garage there's the small matter of that back wall. It's about 3 metres high this side and only 1 m the other side. So what's holding it up, I hear you ask. Good question - not a lot. 

Without the scaffolding we can start to see how it's going to look like. The east cart door, with glazed top and side panels. All we need now is a door. But the joinery company hasn't made them yet ...

Plasterboard in the cloakroom. The brick plinth is completely covered. At the top of the plinth, at sole plate level, is a sort of shelf.

Plasterboard in the study – again with a plinth shelf at sole plate level.

Plasterboarding the kitchen area – blockwork plinth will be insulated with 75mm Celotex.

The northeast passage, long regarded as fraught with danger and well nigh impassable. Well, here it is, revealed in all it's glory. Not so scary after all. Something to do with global warming?

One of the questions we've been wrestling this week is whether or not we need a de-coupling membrane. Sounds painful but it's really just a layer of plastic, or something ,between the floor finish (tiles or slabs) and the concrete screed underneath. It's particularly needed in the case of a natural floor finish such as limstone slabs or travertine. It allows movement between the floor finish and the underlying screed as they expand and contract at different rates - of particular concern where you have underfloor heating. We've seen lengthy articles on the internet saying how essential such a membrane is if you want to avoid cracking. But none of the guys we've spoken to has ever heard of them. Hmm.

Underpinning the north wall looks even more daunting than underpinning the barn. The problem here is the weight of soil, not to mention the farm house,  sitting up there behind the wall. Putting a new foundation under the wall could be a little tricky.  Wouldn't want all that lot coming down once we start undermining the wall to insert a new concrete foundation. Of particular concern as a couple of guys were killed last year, at a barn not far from here, when a wall they were working on collapsed.

And finally