Around a week ago we arrived at the house to find our insulation installers had had a bit of an accident. Opening their van something must have tumbled out, spilling thousands of polystyrene balls onto our drive. As environmentalists the sight of all this litter was horrifying. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a hoover to attempt a clean up. Remembering this weekend to bring a hoover I set to work trying to clean up the mess. Sadly, lots of the balls had already been trodden into the mud, making it really difficult to get everything. Still the hoover did its job and I got the vast majority off our drive. Bring on the day when all polystyrene is banned!

Inside the house I found the insulators had left their mark in a more pleasant way. After we placed plastic sheeting on the ceiling as a vapour membrane, the insulators were supposed to stick their wall membrane to it before adding the plaster board on top. Unfortunately they hadn’t realised that’s what we’d intended, and they put the plasterboard on without joining the two membranes together. To correct this I carefully unscrewed the board to stick down the membrane. What I found under one board was our insulator’s signatures, letting future generations know what they had contributed to the house. There is a long running tradition across the world of craftsman secretly or officially signing off their work. I taped the membranes together avoiding covering their writing, before hiding the signatures back behind the board.

While the floorboards upstairs are lovely, they are sadly too old to be easy to replace. Where the stairs were we needed to fill in the gap, but haven’t found any similar boards for sale. In the end we decided to go for more standard chipboard and put carpet down in the room that is planned to be our office. Chris did a great job filling the gaps, making the room much less of a health and safety hazard.

During the insulation installation the tap pipe in the old kitchen was bent, meaning the section needed to be replaced. Chris spent a bit of time planning out where the sink and toilet would go in this room before installing a new tap.

In order to avoid the dust being created by Chris’s work on the new doorway, I headed outside to plug some holes above the old steel in the back wall. At the moment this steel is rusting, as it hasn’t been properly protected from the weather. The rusting steel has the swollen, lifting up the stones above. As they lifted this has caused the various cracks in our back wall. In the long-term we need to decide what to do about this steel, but for now I spent some time scraping out the soft mortar and filling gaps, to help prevent water seeping into the wall, and causing further rusting.

Inside, Chris cut off the last few jagged edges from the doorway, before I stepped into repoint the loosened rocks.

But of course much of the weekend was spent continuing with digging the floor. While the previous weekend’s digging had been physically hard, this weekend’s had an added mental strain. In order to have space for all the material going on top we needed to dig down a minimum of 18cm, ideally 20cm. While this seemed to go fairly well on half the floor, the other half just refused to go any deeper. We measured it at 15cm, and then dug and dug through the tough ground, moving one wheelbarrow after another. Stopping to measure and….15cm. Sigh.

As well as our magically regenerating floor we came to realise that in one corner of the room our stonework stops at a level higher than the final floor level…..hm not ideal. We can’t have the floor level any higher as this will result in stepping down into the adjoining room. After some debate we decided we could create a concrete buttress around this portion of the wall, which would be hidden behind the kitchen cupboards. Hopefully the wall won’t fall down in the meantime…

With all these complications we have had a bit of good news. We’ve accepted an offer on our current house. After a few weeks advertising it ourselves, we’re very pleased and hoping things continue as planned. That does mean that we need to be able to move our mortgage across to the new house, which we can only do once it’s in a mortgagable state. Let’s just hope the floor stops regenerating and let’s us finish the job so we can get a kitchen in…