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23rd to 29th February 2004

Monday was a busy day - block layers on site to start the internal walls, a 32m concrete pump to help fill the wall cavities up with more waterproof concrete (Xypex) then allowing the blockies to follow on and raise the internal skins of the walls by 4 courses.  Well that was the theory.

The first fun bit was getting 3 loads of concrete (1 full and 2 part) from Chepstow rather than Ross on Wye - and all by the same driver.  This meant we had the pump on site for 6 hours for around 1.5hrs work.  A number of discussions with the Premix firm enabled them to understand my concern and a number of promises of better prices and service have been made for the future.

The next bit was the fact I had missed the need to shutter or support the walls when filling with concrete - even though we were only filling three courses.  To be correct the most important stange seems to be when using a vibrating poker to consolidate the concrete.  We had one small wall pop a corner - although this was noticed quickly and a pack of blocks forked against the wall, allowing the concrete to cure and then the damaged skin removed and relaid the next day.  By the end of the day I was seeing problems all over the site but realisitically we were lucky and there was only the one small problem described above.  Some thought was then given to how to continue the filling - shuttering was one option and continue to pump - the other was to try a manual approach will a smaller amount of mix in one go - we decided to give the second option a try to see how it goes - see next week for the answer!

The block laying was uneventful but we did decide to add 3 or 4 piers to the internal walls - just getting over cautious (I hope!).

In the middle of the week we relaid the land drain behind the back house wall and started refilling with clean stone - this was the wall that collapsed earlier when I had overfilled it too soon - so a cautious approach was used - especially as it is 11 courses high now.

We also continued laying the land drain behind the retaining wall getting ready for some back filling on this soon.  With this in mind I also double checked the amount of pipe needed for the heat pump we are going to use to heat the house - 640m of 32mm mdpe pipe to generate 8kW!!  This will be laid in horizontal loops in a 160m trench 1.8m deep - at the moment we've ordered the pipe to insert the tails before the wall is backfilled - laying the loops will come later.

At the end of the week the gorgeous weather turned to snow so little more than tidying up happened.