June/ July Update – Weeks 13-14

With the ground inside the barn prepared for the floor slab to go in, a delivery of 5 cubic metres of concrete was ordered for the Wednesday. I was summoned down to Wales as it would be all hands on deck. They weren’t wrong: - for a whole manic hour (concrete sets quite quickly in hot weather and also we were paying for the lorry by the hour) David and Paul were wheeling barrow after barrow of concrete into the barn while I was stuck inside raking and tamping the concrete. Finally by lunchtime we had half of the floor slab laid, the rest can’t be laid until the gable wall has been re-built.

At the weekend we still had two thin channels of the floor slab (left clear in order to be able to tamp the last load) to fill with concrete but this time mixing it up ourselves which took a lot longer. As we couldn’t really do much else other than watch it set we gave ourselves the afternoon off to watch the England game. I’m not sure what was more exhausting- laying a concrete floor or sitting through that game!


Last week saw the retaining wall finally get finished, hooray! A very impressive 10 courses high at its highest point- not very beautiful but that didn’t stop David standing admiring it for half an hour! We will of course face it with natural stone on completion, but not one of the most urgent tasks at the moment.

Another two weeks of unusually fine weather provided David with the opportunity to put in the soakaway. The soakaway is a 48 metre long, 900mm deep trench gradually sloping downhill from the septic tank and filled with 40mm drainage stone.