A day of moving gravel

Thursday 28 March 2019

The next job towards getting the floors all done involves the moving of gravel.  Several years ago, when we thought we would be tiling the music room, we laboriously installed about 30cm of fresh gravel on the packed earth; and that has been our floor in there ever since.  However, the plan has moved on, and we now want to put a wood floor in the music room.  The joists will rest on a wooden ring beam, and it all needs to have an air gap below, so the gravel has to go.  Pete and Paris came to help, and Lin came to watch because she's been ill and can't do anything strenuous

 The 300kg stove is sitting on a plinth of concrete.  When we realised how heavy it was, we didn't have time to make a limecrete plinth - we needed something that would be good and solid within a couple of weeks of installation.  But we minimised the concrete, and only made this small area.  As the floor here is to be an extension of the kitchen - the stove includes an oven, of course - it will be tiled.  The process is: frame out the level we want the slab (3cm down from final floor level); fill with gravel up to 12cm down from that; then pour a 12cm limecrete slab and wait for it to go off.  Here are the first two sections on either side of the stove waiting for gravel.

 This is the music room floor, still cardboarded.  We took up the cardboard, then Dave and Pete started shovelling gravel into buckets, while Paris and I lugged them into the living room.  Lots of dust!

 Some (remarkably short) time later, both framed areas are gravelled up.  So Dave decided we might as well pour the slab for at least one of them today.

 Dave making mixes

 Meanwhile, Lin had (yet another) go at resolving my curtain rail problem.  There is a company in Athens that sells curtain rails.  It has a website in English.  No-one there speaks English, so Lin has become my go-between.  All I want is three curtain rails that are operated with string.  The company sells them.  All we want is to know how much they cost.  Several phone calls and over three months later (due to Lin not being available, and us being away) we still don't know.  On with the saga!

 Having been fobbed off on the phone once again, Lin takes to tamping down gravel

 Paris and I are still moving gravel.  As the stove areas filled up so fast, we quickly emptied the Solarium of furniture, and now we're putting the gravel in there to bring the floor level up - this is a job on the list, but we didn't expect it to happen today!

 By the evening, Dave's made five mixes and I've levelled off one side and put the remainder in the other side.  We intend to make the rest of the mixes tomorrow and get the other area filled too.

 Pete, being indefatigable, has cleared all the gravel from the music room, exposing the packed earth floor.  This will need more digging out round the edges so we can get in to fit and level a ring beam.

 The team - dusty and exhausted.

The solarium, with a proper floor level and some mats to make it cheerful.