More foundation wall

Saturday 15 Nov 2014

Our friends, Pete and Naomi, have missed both our bale raisings, due to being in the UK at the wrong time, and were keen to put in some time helping us build, so we arranged a day and they were willing to tackle plastering the studio, while Dave and I looked at building a foundation for the remaining bit of the east wall.

 Just getting the terrace decking up was a job in itself, and we were very pleased to find a roll of hot water pipe we'd forgotten all about.  We were also pleased to find that we had 38cm of concrete ring-beam to build a foundation on.  We need 35cm for the bales, so any less would have meant extending the foundation.  With 38cm as long as the wall goes straight up, it will be wide enough.

 Meanwhile, the studio looks like this on the internal wall side, only half built, 

 but I had managed to get the external wall laths in place and ready to go

 Pete and Nim at lunch after a hard morning's plastering

 Putting the first stones into the foundation wall.  I'm inside the cellar space, building, while Dave makes mortar for me, plaster for Pete and Nim, and brings stones, gravel and mortar to me.  Everytime Pete comes downstairs to refill his bucket, Dave has only just sat down. Pete thinks he's slacking!

 At the end of a very productive day: most of the studio wall plastered ...

and rather more wall built than I'd expected.  

After using all our best stones on the base level, we thought about the waste breeze blocks around where the Winnebago used to be - if we'd used those first we could have had the nice stones above terrace level.  Oh well, too late.  I used a few under where the threshold will be and several more broken up and used as filler in the back.