This has been a pretty big lapse of three years, for which I apologise to our interested party. It's been a funny old three years and, as ever, with these projects, the best laid schemes, and all that.

So, in the intervening period the demolition and remodelling of the wall divide between living room and bread oven has been completed, the breadoven has been cleaned and restored, the ground floor has been dug up and its tiles and earth replaced with sand, under which drainage pipes have been laid and the ground floor finally concreted. Last year the house and breadoven had a new roof plus a dormer window in the area which will become the bathroom.

On top of that we had a fosse sceptic installed, which involved excavating a six by four metre square hole, over two metres deep, into solid granite. Fortunately the deed was done by a company well experienced in such matters. We've built a retaining wall around the front of the house which contains the concrete for the terrace /sun room and will also provide a foundation for future sun room walls. The gable end of the house has had its path cleared with a retaining wall separating the garden from the path and house which has also been concreted. Finally the debris from all of this activity has finally been cleared from the front of the house revealing a very interesting stone lying on the ground.

That's probably enough to be going along with. The photos may be a bit confusing, but where I can, I've tried to show some before and afters as we go. Click on 'Previous' and 'Next' to navigate to the various pages.

Anyway, after living with heaps of rubble in front of the house for about four years, we decided to finally clear it away. The main motivation was to be able to get about without breaking our necks and the other was to be able to see what the place might eventually look like when all the shit is gone. After clearing the front area we rediscovered a big slab which we'd remembered from before the rubble heap. It was lying flat and looked like a threshold perhaps. I'm far more convinced that it was a standing stone knocked over in some anti pagan purge - well that's the story I'm going with. So, we stood it back up.