1st - 4th February 2010

Everything had gone so smoothly last week and great progress had been made but then a storm arrived at the weekend, with gale force winds, to set things back a bit. The packets of polystyrene that had arrived last week had scattered themselves across the neighbourhood and Dave spent much of Monday retrieving them. Incidentally this gave him an excuse to have a close look at some of the neighbouring sections and saved him from a bit of digging, so it was all good. Several of the sheets had attached themselves to blackberry bushes, another was at least 300m up the gully and at least one was never found.



Meanwhile, back on the site, the sun and wind were blowing away the sand foundation and needed constant watering.

Because of this problem, and because labourer Richard was away on holiday, it was decided to proceed with the garage floor first and get that covered and concreted rather than waiting until the whole site was ready.

Tuesday
The sand on the garage floor had to be raised to the correct level. It was clear that the original floor preparation was slightly too low, so more sand had been brought in and Dave had spent his time distributing it evenly and bringing it up to the right height.

Once done, polystyrene was put on the inside of the foundation wall and covered with black polythene.


Wednesday
The garage floor was ready to be covered.

And Dave had to turn his attention to the enormous job of raising the height of the house floor.

By the end of the day, the polythene on the garage floor had been covered by polystyrene sheets ....

and reinforcing metal laid on them ....

and it was all tied down, just in case.
Thursday
Nearly ready now. The metal reinforcing has been lifted up on its supports and nicely tied into the metal around the edge wall.


while Dave had developed his own implement to compact down his redistributed sand and had completed about a quarter of the house site. Quite hard work, I'm reliably informed.

Friday
Well everything stops for the rugby in this part of the world! The sevens had come to town and that meant a welcome day off for Dave. Although the sun and wind meant he had to visit to water the house site, at least he didnt have to get there by 8am.