Update 07/06/07

Progress has been a little slower this week, but we have moved on. We now have almost all the blockwork for the foundations in and they have started excavating the floor and the corner of the house for the main pier. This pier effectively holds up the house! It will support beams in 3 directions, one of which carries 2 other beams - basically all the beams holding the outside walls of the first floor! Geoff realised that unless he put the pier in now, he would have trouble getting to it later as it has a 1.6m square padstone underneath the pier itself which is 440mm x 440mm engineering bricks. So....

We have moved the piano and sideboard out of the lounge into storage and Geoff will be shuttering off the corner and taking out the corner of the house to build the pier.


Concrete and a bit of blockwork:
This is the corner for the pier... Note the existing foundations - a couple of wider courses of brick - and that;s it!!! and we're down nearly 3ft for the extension.

The remainder of the drive coming up ready for the new floor. We need to go down a little deeper as we have 100mm of insulation and 75mm of screed on top of the slab for the UFH. We have doubled the required 50mm insulation to maximise the efficiency of the UFH.
One of those little things you forget - our washing line used to go between the house and the doghouse - no doghouse, so a new 'high-tech' line goes up!

Now we have blockwork all the way round the main extension excluding the bay: