Nothing much done on Saturday as Shaun was feeling ill all day (very unusual)… So Stephen just fixed a saftey rope from one end of the ridge to the other.
On Sunday Shaun made good progress and stripped a third of the roof.
Monday Shaun continued the good work (but the computer recording the images was not working properly and only recorded the last part of the day).
Day 2 sees the tiles come flying off with increasing speed.
The technique is improving but it is time now to make a neat pile for the rubbish so we can treat it properly.
The tiles are well fixed, using copper attachments in the third hole and two more normal iron nails for the main fixings. The roof isn’t showing any signs of rottenness, quite solid!
The chimney is in very good condition without any wearing or mortar failing! They knew how to do a proper job in those days!
After the problems bailing out the actual pour went smoothly!
There were 3 loads of concrete (Agilia Force) delivered between 11:00 and 12:15. Each load only took 3-4 minutes to pour into the formwork! The mix was quite fluid and only need gentle encouragement to spread out evenly, we only had to walk around pushing with our boots to get a good level.
When we were satisfied we had a even distribution of concrete the Lafarge rep (Kevin) brought out his agitator bars. These are round poles held horizontally with two handles rising up to hold. These had to be used in two passes, 1st pass involved moving up and down about 50mm then advancing by the width of the pole and repeating (this releases any traped air). 2nd pass was a light dabble over the surface to give a smooth finish.
The rain continued to fall in showers (even hail) while we were working and Daphne bailed out some of the excess water from the corners where it had been pushed by the concrete.
Finally Kevin sprayed a wax based agent all over the finished concrete to help the slab cure properly.
Here is an edited and speeded up (16 times) video of the pour.
The growing and unstoppable hole continues .. .. We are nearly there! Does anyone want some nice soft sand? Going cheap! Just bring your own 20ton lorry!
The main part of the backwards “L” is done today. Just the little spur to do tomorrow!
The dumper truck is holding well, no sign of the flat battery problem but the level, at the end of the day, was 12.91V which it is a bit low. Again it has been cloudy today compared with yesterday. Yesterday the voltage was a good 13.5V and there were much more loads to move and hence more starts! But it was glorious sunny weather! So the solar panel does do a good job even though it is only rated at 1.5W!
With the newly energised Dumper Truck (the battery is now fully charged!) Stephen dashed out to do as possible before the forecasted heavy rain comes!! guess What? No Rain! Stephen worked all day and we counted 36 loads dugs out! Phew!
Lovely day with both the weather and the amount of work done!
It’s time to go around the bend tomorrow! The spur of the L is next!
Stephen is working hard in digging the Great Hole! It is a case of doing a few hours in between rain showers and sometimes heavy ones!! But also tackling man made problems like the battery going flat on us (The infamous Dumper Incident!).
Quick before the rain comes!
The Dumper Incident or is it a Friday 13th thing??!
The Great Hole is coming so watch this space!!
We started digging for gold today! The 4.2m wide (over 13 feet) by 18m long (59feet) hole is quite big with a spur (like a capital L) spur for another 5m (16 feet). Oh Yes it is as deep as we can go with the digger and this is about 2.5m (8feet) down! Down! down we go! Now that’s a lot of dirt or rather in this case sand!
We discovered that the sand is quite loose and keeps collapsing into the hole so we are being careful not to get too close with the digger!
The heaps will grow and grow so we might end up blocking the camera view! Certainly the house’s windows will be completely blocked! So we are thinking of extending the pole up some extra metres to peer over!
We decided to repair our temporary storage come accommodation’s roof. The wooden building is over 8 years old so the original roofing felt is cracking up! We had the job on our list of things to do and since we were waiting for our building control to approve our plan B in installing our Earth Tubes so we did the repair job instead!
We got the cheapest felt money can buy and a couple of tin of black sticky glue and got up on the roof! No Nails this time and new felt straight on top of old! It only has to last a couple of more years!
The footprint of the garage and driveway has been cleared. The top soil was removed (about 300mm, a foot) and dumped on the heap which we are now calling Mount Sod! 
Yes it is getting big! We found a old buried rubbish pile containing bones (small ones! Animal ones probably pig), very rusty tin cans, broken glass whatevers and other odds and ends!
We had nice weather (tongue in cheek) on Monday with hail, thunder and lightning! The rain fall was over 11mm in just 20minutes! The lake formed with water off the roof of our shed and water coming down the Loke. We are calling it Lake Puddle! 