Again, we waited in vain for the temperature to rise enough to melt all the ice. The sun was very strong but it only melted the ice where it was deeper and floating on existing water, but the ice directly frozen solid onto the concrete held on for dear life!
So the outside work was postponed and we did other housekeeping tasks instead .. in the warm!
We keep our fingers crossed for tomorrow! It should be warmer! Or Not!!
We decided that it was too icy in the freezing temperatures we had over night (well below zero all night) and the concrete has lots of patches of frozen water all over the place.
It would have been too risky to be playing around with pieces of steel framework that weighs hundreds of kilograms, trying to hoist them up etc.
So after lunch, after waiting to see if the ice will melt, we decided that the day was lost to the weather.
The forecast says that the next 2 days could be warmer with lots of sunshine so we keep our fingers crossed and we can resume progress.
It was completely out of the blue a letter arrived in November to inform us that Stephen was required to make himself available for Jury Service at Norwich Crown Court for the first two weeks of January.
He has now finished his Civic duty as of today (actually only doing a total of 5 days since 3rd January last week but serving on one jury) so we can now resume our building work and start assembling the steel work!
It will be good to get going again after all the interruptions of illnesses, festive celebrations and the jury service we had in the last month!
We had another round with the cold virus, putting Worker Shaun out of action this last week.
Worker Stephen was able to carry on with only an occasional assistance to help move steel pieces.
This afternoon, we got out our submersible pump and connected up with some 32mm bore plastic pipe to pump the rainwater that has collected in our house, from the last couple of days of rain showers we had.
Water-Water-everywhere
We estimated about 4500 litres of rainwater has fallen, forming a complete “lake” across the whole Floor Slab. We had about 15mm to 20mm of rain in this period of 3 days and the area of the Floor Slab is about 260 square metres which means that for every single millimetre of rainwater falling out of the sky, we would have collected 260litres of water. Since we had about 15mm to 20mm (according to the rain gauge), this means we had collected approximately 15mm x 260 litre per mm = 3900 litres .. to .. 20mm x 260 litre per mm = 5200 litres – wow!
We spent about 2 hours pumping the water out, mostly from the 2nd sump point near the Great Room where the “lake” seems to be deeper and more connected to the rest of the Floor Slab. Initially, we had 3 lengths of output pipe connected together so we could reach the downpipe directly connected to the underground rain soakaway module and we measured the time it took to fill a 3 gallon builder’s bucket (which came out at 20 seconds). This is about 40 litres per minute. Then, when we moved up to the 2nd sump point, we had to drain the output water from the pump straight into the swimming lane itself and this meant that we didn’t need the middle section of pipe (which is a corrugated air tube) and so we connected the 32mm smooth bore pipe directly to the short fat pipe off the pump and .. o boy .. it took only 15 seconds to fill our bucket up! This translated to an increased rate of 55 litres per minute!
We woke up to the news that we had well over 10mm of rain overnight, plus the 5mm we had the day before and thus making 15mm of rain! Oh My! And Tomorrow, it is the day of the Floor Slab being poured with just short of 30,000 litres of concrete!!
Rain-lying-on-Sunday-Morning-3
Rain-lying-on-Sunday-Morning-1
Rain-lying-on-Sunday-Morning-2
But after inspecting the plastic, it is not that bad at all actually. It seems that there is still plenty of “holes” in the plastic layer, namely all the various pipes (all 40 odd of them!) sticking up and the concrete blobs around their bases doesn’t make an absolute watertight seal and the rain water is able to leak out slowly.
This is good news – Thank Goodness!! Or we would have to clear out well over 3500 litres of water if it had been perfectly sealed! Phew!
We tackled the second half of the ivy choked blackthorn and hawthorn wild hedge that runs across the bottom of our garden between us and the school field. It was another hot day of cutting and sawing down the side branches and this time, there were some massive ones! One in particular, hanging way over our living quarters, was a big fat 6 inch diameter branch about 12 feet long!
But we managed to get it all cleared and the whole line looks a lot better now.
Hedge-Trimming-Day-2-1
Hedge-Trimming-Day-2-2
And all the smaller pieces went through the shredding machine and we have filled up a second “ton” bag .. and some!!
Hedge-Trimming-Day-2-Doubled-up-on-the-shreddings
The hedge will eventually be completely replaced with a proper fencing when the garden and veg/fruit patch is landscaped after the house is built, so it is rather wild with Ivy growing in it and mostly left to its own devices to enjoy nature at its best!!
We started today on tidying up the area inside the footprint of our house, winding up hose, putting up the ramp over the wall at the back door nearest the garage ..
Back-door-ramp
We loaded up a wheelbarrow with concrete block offcuts to take away to our “rubbish” bag beside the hedge boundary with the school field.
This is when we were diverted into doing a different task, of trimming back the hedge and balancing up the weight of the whole hedge. We have got to do this as yesterday saw a huge tractor come back and forth on the school field a half a dozen times trimming back our hedge on their side! They sliced and chopped very large branches (well over 50mm / 2 inches in places!) which were hanging over their field with their massive machine, which only took them about 30 minutes to do it all! So we realised that we had to do something similar our side!!
The picture below shows you how big some of the overhanging branches we got growing out of our hedge and that is what has disappeared on the school field side!
Hedge-before-Trimming
So we chopped and sliced using our pruning shears and electric sabre saw and then shredded up virtually all the cut-offs and loaded the shredded pieces into a large “ton” bag, filling it right to the top ..
Hedge-Trimming-a-large-bag-of-shreddings
That will compost down very nicely into good quality fiber mulch, ready for our garden and veg patch when we get that done in a year or so time – smile!
We got half way along the hedge with our efforts today as you can see in the picture below
Hedge-Trimming-Day-1
And tomorrow we will finish off the remaining of the hedge and have that job done before we have an accident of strong winds causing the hedge to break and dump some of these overhanging branches to crash into our temporary living quarters!! We say “Thank You” School for diverting us when we were not planning this job just yet!!
After lunch, because of the rain forecasted to arrive about 4pm to 5pm which made block laying impractical we had to do something else. So we moved and tidied up the remaining concrete blocks and distributed them around the complete circuit to where they are needed ready for the resumption of work on Monday.
Blocks-ready-for-final-rows
Yes indeed the weather guys got it right, we had the arrival of the rain around 4:30pm!! Grin!
It was a pleasant day this Sunday .. until a huge dark cloud came slowly over at about 17:30 and dropped about 30mm of rain in an hour!! Wow Wee!!
But we didn’t have any flooding onto our building area, just surface water in little puddles here and there. The defences we built to hold back the workshop and the Loke runoffs worked very well. The workshop water was collected and poured into our swimming lane, and the Loke ran down and even though it managed to get deep enough to climb over our berm across the driveway, the overflowing water went further down and away from our building site – phew!
Lake-on-the-loke
It did collect down at the bottom of the garden around our living quarters and formed a fairly large “lake” but it didn’t quite (phew again!) reach our floor level at the store room and front doors!!