Back in the main house, the roof space above my bedroom is completely enclosed by brick walls and there is no access hatch.   I removed a brick from the attic room wall to have a look inside.

The space hasn’t been touched for over 100 years.  There is no insulation in there at all – no wonder I was chilly last winter!   I’ll install an access door from the attic to fit insulation.  The structural engineer wanted to see in there so I’ll put the door in before asking him around to look at the barn roof.

I have spoiled the attic decoration a little.  The lintel is in and I need to wait for the mortar to dry before knocking a doorway through.  The wall on the other side of the attic is a stud wall which was easier to knock through.

The roof covering through there is not in a good state.  I’m inclined to get some scaffolding up next year and get the roof and other external work done.   The structure isn’t rotten but the nails holding the tiles have rusted away and many of the tiles have slipped which makes it difficult to do local repairs.

I saved around 45 bricks from the hole and they appear to be the same as the bricks used in the external walls.  Saves going to the reclaimed brick place.

The access door doesn’t go all the way down to the floor because the ceiling on the other side of the hole is a lot higher (and there will be 270mm of insulation on top).   That’s the thing I want to chat to the structural engineer about.

If the attic room floor were higher we could still just about have an attic (only with badly placed windows) and it would be just about possible to have a room below on the first floor instead of the void (also with badly placed windows).   The plan is not fully thought through yet.

In the meantime the attic is a useful bedroom so I’ll put some door frames in and redecorate.  Later a substantial amount of insulation.

Oh dear,  the barn roof turns out to be a bit iffy.

The roof has some nice oak beams but they turn out to be mostly decorative.   Normally pretty oak beams would form part of a roof truss, but the principal rafters you might expect to see in a roof truss are missing here.   There are a couple of purlins which are supported by posts back to the middle of the the tie beams which have become bendy as a result.

The roof spread (leaning walls) looks like it may have been caused by a lack of attachment between the tie beams and the wall plate (bit of wood on top of the walls).  Some attachments were added in 1983 (I found a newspaper stuffed in) but they aren’t perfect and the movement is still ongoing at around 1mm/year.

I’ve stripped the plasterboard from the inside of the roof to see what the structure is.   Fixing it will take some thought.   Probably putting back the structure you would expect to see and adding a bit of steel to join the crusty bits together.   It’s all very annoying.  Putting a kitchen in would have been enough hassle.

The driveway has been a bit of a mess since the dwarf wall was removed and the driveway sloped down to meet the pavement.   This is how it was originally:

With the setts and edgings done I can put some gravel on top to make it look pretty.  A couple of tonnes of MOT stone were spread out during the freakishly hot weather in July.  It will be topped in gravel once the MOT has been flattened and whacked down.

The driveway will be temporary as I would like to build the garage at a lower ground level, but that will be a good couple of years away.

3 tonnes of gravel later and the front of the house looks much nicer.  I ought to find somewhere to hide the concrete mixing board to give the illusion of tidy.

A while ago the builders next door dug a trench around our house to make the exterior ground level lower than interior floor level.  Previously there was a French drain but that didn’t work, so the plan is to leave the trench open and cover with a grating.

A cast iron grating would be lovely but the quote was £5,000.  I went for a fibreglass grating that looks much the same from a company called Fibregrid.   It looks excellent.

The grating is supported on one side by the retaining wall.  I didn’t want to bolt it to the house wall on the other side for fear of trapping water.  Instead it is supported on stainless steel tubes screwed to stainless threaded rod which might eventually be resin fixed into the concrete base.

My bricklaying is getting better.  The edging is quarter brick on end.

With the edging in I can fill up the hole behind the retaining wall.  This will make it much less risky to exit via the kitchen door.   Only the driveway to gravel now.

A lot of this work will be adjusted in a couple of years time when the garage is built at a much lower ground level. It’s nice to be able to practice. (Edit from future me – ground levels are just fine when you have a trench and I like the brickwork.)

All of the planning conditions have been discharged so we can make a start!    First on the list is the driveway which needs an edging before the kerb can be dropped at vast expense.  I’ve gone for granite setts.

I’m new to building work, but books, the internet, and people have been very helpful. Here is my first brickwork since a day at a technical college around 25 years ago.  Also my first concrete foundation to the foreground, needed because the ground had recently been dug up in the area.  My first re-pointing is coming up soon on the wall in the background.

We found the original brick setts about 6 inches below the current ground level.  They look similar to the setts around the concrete patio to the rear of the house, but much less eroded.  The 6 inch slope up to next door runs against the slope of the road and is a constant pain to work with.  The drive will need a bit of trickery to make it work.

Most of the granite setts went in today in very hot sun.   The wiggly ones at the far end aren’t finished yet.  The wall needs pointing and the cover for the drain at the side of the house has arrived and needs figuring out.

There is a lorry coming to pick up a skip in a couple of days so a mad panic to put a bit more concrete in to support the setts (as strongly recommended by both the builder next door and the one across the road).   If I were to have planned ahead I would have pressed a bit of gravel into the concrete.   I don’t have the gravel yet.  I can see that being a pain.

My first lime pointing went OK, though I’ll remember next time not to wet the lime so early as I’ve also lime washed the wall.  The big hole at the bottom will be filled with cement to help direct the gutter into the drain without going via the snug.

I’m getting better at building walls.  The one at the bottom left of the photo isn’t straight but the mortar and pointing went better this time.  I have a book on bricklaying but haven’t read it yet.  Just need to figure out how best to fit the (almost) proper real cast iron grating.

The dropped kerb guy came to do another survey this morning.   The first quote was over £4000 for dropping 5m of kerb, so we’re aiming for closer to 3m now and have set the level of the setts to avoid any work either side.

That’s all for the next month or so.  Busy!

Just over a year ago I posted about rot in the snug.   I think the problem was due to internal floor levels being up to 300mm lower than external ground levels.  I was thinking about putting a proper French drain in.

It turns out there was already a proper French drain in place and the plastic pipe dates it to fairly recent, but it was completely clogged up with dirt.  Another solution was needed.

We dug out the gravel from the French drain and a bit more soil, and put a concrete drain in the bottom with a bit of a slope.  The original French drain emptied into a soakaway which was also blocked so we cleaned it out and replaced the pipe.   Water doesn’t puddle in the trench and it’s 150mm to 200mm below internal floor level which should help the snug dry out.

Next on the job list is to build a short retaining wall to support the car park and fit grating on top to stop willow leaves from falling in.  The trench will be ventilated to keep the walls dry, and should be reasonably easy to clear out when it fills up with muck.

It’s been chaos around here for the last couple of days.   The new build next door has been installing their services all at the same time.  Diggers, cutters and drills all day yesterday.   Electricity had to come from across the road, so there were traffic lights outside the house.   Our driveway was out of action while they installed sewerage.

It would have cost them a fortune to connect to the main sewer so we agreed they could connect to our sewer in exchange for some help with lowering the end of our car park for the new dropped kerb.

We’ve finally constructed a fence to define the new boundary that lies in the car park.  We have the dimensions of the fence agreed in the contract with the current owner of the car park but the fence needed to go up before the remainder of the car park is sold (I note the car park is under offer on 2nd April).

The fence doesn’t go all the way to the pavement yet.  The driveway will ultimately go where the smoking shelter is at the moment, but it needs to be approved by Planning and the Highway Agency which will take a few months.  Also we ran out of fence boards and Crowthornes is shut for Easter.

This is roughly how it might end up.  I am hoping to add a garage just behind the fence. The garage might be better in natural wood.

The fence at the rear overlooking Wellsfield also needs to be replaced.  That will hopefully happen in May.