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1st to 7th March 2004

Started the week waiting for concrete - the cold weather played havoc with getting the stuff out of the yard - it eventually arrived on Tuesday afternoon and we placed 2m3 into the cavities manually without any problem.

Given the delays we spent some time burning rubbish from the old cottage and starting to separate reusable stone from the rubble pile.

We then did the same thing again on Friday - another 2m3 placed in the cavities.

Other than that the main part of the week was spent finishing off land drains behind the retaining walls, tidying up and pulling pipes through the ducts in preparation for the heat pump.

The heat pump pulls energy from the earth and pushes it up the temparture gradient into the house (simply put a damned big fridge - feel the outside back of your fridge if you don't see what I mean).  In our case the source of energy will be a long pipe - 640m buried in the ground 1.8m down. Check the links pages for more info.

On Saturday the groundworkers returned to slice off a bit more of the hill behind the retaining wall - thereby reducing the height of the wall needed.  As well as this (and indeed the main reason for the earthworks) the retaining wall was partially backfilled. Only partially as the cavities are not fully filled and we don't want any more horizontal walls thank you!

At the same time most of the external walls were going up to 11 courses - the height at which the floor beams will be placed - so it may seem to us that things are going on for ever and we are not out of the ground but some progress is happening.