September 20 2008

It had taken the pair of us 3 and half months of near continuous work to:- 


Take down the old back and tidy up, 


Dig down the floor and get it level. 


Sort out the problem of Bay Tree Corner.


Put in the footings and build up the block work to damp course level.


Lay the membrane and insulation, 


Pour the floor. 


We still had a few days left before I had to go back to sea so we built up the block work walls to the correct height with the window openings in and built up the interior stone wall that we intended to leave in as a feature. 

The building is 10 meters wide. The floor we are laying will be the lounge which is 10 X 5. the middle 4 meters of which will be glass.
The middle 2 meters of the glass is fixed triple pilkington X with a large wood burner with water jacket (thats what the pipe are for in the middle) and the two outside meters of the opening will be sliding doors doors. 
I hope that make sense to you reader and if not then ask me for more info or keep reading and it will make sense later. (I think) 

Here I am building up the blockwork walls which will be lime and mud rendered on the inside and stone clad on the outside the total thickness will be 500mm. As a novice at blockwork I was rather pleased with the result.

Next I had to build up the inside stone wall which we intend to leave on display. 

Having never attempted any stone walling before I was a bit unsure about it and my ability to get it right. 

There was much looking and putting a few stones up and then looking again to see if it in anyway resembled the old bit next to it. 

I called MrsB many times to just check and use her "arty eye" for me to see if it looked OK, and she kept telling me it looked fine so Icarried on  and it ended up like this 

It was getting really close to going back to sea time now and as I had a really busy winter work schedule planned we decided to wrap it up well and protect all the walls for winter. 

So MrsB and I started the work at the beginning of June 2008 as a pair of complete novices as far as proper building was concerned, and it looked like this. 

Although we'd had a few visitors we rarely took any days off and by September 20th it looked like this. 

The tarpaulins are to protect the torchis walls for the winter and worked a treat they remained bone dry throughout. 
I had fitted temporary gutters to the back with down pipes set up to take the water away from the new floor and out into the garden 


Mrs B and I were “well chuffed” as we felt we had achieved a great deal, had learnt masses and had made our mark on, and connected with the building. 
We had also created useful contacts in the local builders merchants timber yard and hire centres. 
It was with happy heads but heavy hearts we wrapped up the building to protect it for the winter, battened down the sheds and left for the UK on 20th Sept. 
I had to go back to sea and earn some money for the next phase and Mrs B had a winter of college.
I took a short leave inj the middle of Feb so we popped over for a couple of weeks and went over our plans and  checked the sequence of work we needed to do. We spent some time as either tourists or just snuggled up in the sheds staying, close and getting to know our home.