I am basically a miner now, such is my hole-digging prowess. Last weekend we dug a total of 3.5 metres worth of holes for footings. It got to the point where I couldn’t reach the bottom of the holes from ground level, but it was too tight to shovel dirt while standing in the hole, so I ended up just randomly scraping dirt out by hand. As in, literally with my bare fingers. So old school.
The biggest surprise this week has been discovering the extent of the damp problem. A bit of rising damp can cause mouldy walls and damage to plaster, but in our case it is so bad that the water is literally trickling down the bedroom walls. We found a massive crack in the front wall (big enough to stick my arm through) and discovered that there is basically no drainage at all. Well, unless you count all the guttering and stormwater draining to directly under the house. The whole house is basically sitting in a puddle. We pulled up a few floorboards and found a freaking indoor mud bath under in the living room. The house is so old that all he footings and stumps are just big lumps of bluestone, which are now swimming around in the mud. AWESOME.
Lee and I like to stand at the back door and look out over our vast backyard. All 6m x 14m of it. The whole block is 237m2, which is pretty damn small, but we are managing to fit a lot of stuff in. At the moment we are fitting in several massive piles of rubble, rusty corrugated iron and smashed bricks, but hopefully that will turn into a sweet paved courtyard one day.
We got some more finalised plans back from our student architect, and they look ACE. I love this part of it – adjusting doorways to fit in extra storage, calculating how much light we need, shifting floor heights around. Super exciting.
Stuff to get done next weekend
- get a skip/rubbish removal
- measure up guttering
- fix the crack (tie the wall up with strapping)
- bolt up the poles for the shed
- straighten up the bedroom window
xx