Dining Room Floor
This hasn't been a bunch of laughs but the final layer wasn't too bad. The best bit was the fact that our next door neighbour ( at the back with the big field) asked if he could have the earth we were digging out and anything we'd already dug. Bingo!!
So a sizeable mound has started to emerge on a corner of his field. We set up the kitchen so we can store the sand cement and gravel in there, as well as the cement mixer and we've widened the doorway and fixed the floor level for the brick work doorway. |
| And our mound has disappeared. |
Drainage Pit and Electricity Cable
Taking advantage of the good weather and the fact that our neighbour wants all the excavated soil, we decided to dig the drainage pit and trench at the back of the house. This is also the trench for the main electricity cable. This has taken about four days and we had to make a hole below the house foundations for the cable to enter the building. Not as traumatic as we expected. The pit is at the bottom of the garden and the trench runs, at a slope, down to it. |
Trench
First of all we had to level the land adjacent to the house. That's the sum total of earth at the back of the pic in the turf wall. Then we dug down about two feet to a width of about one foot and laid a drainage pipe in the trench (épandrain), that gets covered with stones and sandy soil. At the point where the electric cable enters the house both sit in the trench side by side and get covered with sand and hardcore. The last pic is the cable coming through the foundations into the house, that needs to go through the red protective sheaf, after which it's buried in the hardcore. |
I found a pottery sherd, among a lot of 20th century rubble, that looks medieval - 12th/13th century. It's coarse unglazed ware. I found this example on a website and the type is dated to the late 12th century, about the time as Châteaubrun nearby. |
