Life has been continuing faster than we would like these days and finding time to write about it is hard. I have serious admiration for people who blog, especially people who have jobs and families! On the personal side of things I [Elaine] went back to work following maternity leave in September and our little boy started Big School! A very surreal experience. Our not so new addition is nearly one, which also seems fantastical as it only seems like the other day when she arrived! I have yet to learn to drive [major phobia] so there has been lots of back and forth and up and down the roads with carefully manicured timetables to get everyone to work and school. [ Three cheers for Éanna!]
Eanna has been doing his best to squeeze in the cottage renovations around work and family time and weather. One big downside of doing to work yourself is how slow it can be. It has been tempting to splash a bit of cash and get some help in but in the long [long] run we'll be glad of the money we're saving when it comes to finished etc.
The upside of waiting around for me in parking lots is lots of time to research. I would love to tell you what the plan is but honestly it changes every week and every time we discovered something new at the cottage.
We did get some BIG work done with a 13 ton digger and 9 ton dumper. One of our new neighbours runs a plant/groundworks business so he was handy to get for this job, Éanna was dumper driver for the weekend, to save a few bob.
The main reason for the digger was for taking the ground level down behind the cottage and sheds. The ground level behind the house was actually higher than the floor level in the cottage. One of the first things we noticed when we started taking down the plaster on the inside walls was that the back wall was damp in places where as the front and side walls were dry. This is a common complaint in old cottages and the simplest solution is reducing the ground level and installing french drains (French drains are simply a trench dug approx 0.5-1m away from the wall lined with a geotextile and a land drainage pipe is placed into the trench and filled with clean drainage stone).
Fig.2 You can see the depth of soil that was against the sheds. Even the shed floors had water running across them, it was seeping in from the soil that was against the back wall. You can see an apron of concrete where the brown stain is on the wall, this was probably put there to try and stop water ingress.