building update

Weather report: fine, fine, fine, fine, fine!
Injuries to left hand: 5 Injuries to rest of body: 2

All those injuries are perhaps the best indictor that I’ve been working hard. But to explain where I’m at, I’ll start from very beginning.

My annexe, behind the house, is a cute little 20sqm room which used to be a storeroom with a stone oven at the rear. Here’s how it looked when I bought the house.

The annexe is destined to be a bedroom with an ensuite bathroom, which I will move into while work continues on the main house. I spent about 7 months of last year making the hole for the bathroom. There was a whole lot of bedrock to dig out, and for a long time I resisted using a jackhammer, so much of it was done by hand! Gallery of pictures click here.

Eventually, the hole was deep enough. I put down agricultural drainage and laid a concrete base and walls to compensate for the lack of foundations under the existing walls. Originally those walls sat on a ‘flat’ base of bedrock, but since I have sliced the bedrock so that it forms the lower part of the walls, the stone walls have a lot less supporting them. Hence the reinforced cement sides.

As part of the oven demolition I removed the back wall of the annexe. So my next step was to repair the holes where the back wall met the side walls. I did this as a part of repointing the two adjacent walls (see productive days). In the last week I have finished the top of the neighbours wall, to secure the loose stones and fix them so that they drain water away from my bathroom-to-be. I think it looks quite nice. I’m sure the neighbours (who ran away to Brazil during the Salazar years) would be happy, if they knew.

Next I slapped on a treatment which is meant to stop ’salitre’ or ‘saltpetre‘ which is the mortar degrading via salts being pushed to the surface… we don’t want this even on an unseen wall because it will fill up the air space between old walls/new walls with salty dust and will clog the drainage.

Next, I’m going to lay some bricks… Say goodbye to the neighbours’ wall. It’s the last time it will see daylight for a while… going… going…