I Dig Digging!

Once the ponds were clear we decided to start fixing some of the damp on the house. At the back of the house, where the filtration tanks were, the ground was almost 2ft higher than the floors inside. This has allowed damp to penetrate the walls for over a century. To cure this there are a few options but the obvious way is to lower the ground outside the house below the floors inside the house. Here I should point out that most people would hire a digger to help with this but as we are trying to save as much money as possible Idecided to dig by hand. I dug a trench by the house about 5ft wide almost 2ft deep and in all about 20ft long. There isn't much to say about this except that it was hard and took about 4 days!

Lynn, Jess' mum, deserves a mention. To date she has helped most weekends at the cottage and is not afraid to tackle some of the more difficult tasks either. One of which was the bamboo roots. The bamboo mentioned in a previous post had really estabilished itself along the side of a concrete path. The roots were a mass of matted bamboo extending about a foot into the ground and a foot thick. To give an indication of how hard this was to excavate we attacked it with a pick axe, a crow bar, an axe, a saw and a shovel for about 10 minutes to release a fist sized clump of roots. Needless to say I left Lynn to cope with most of it on her own and she did a sterling job of digging it all out, although I must admit I thought that might be the last time she offered to help.

We then started to get some rain and the trench that I had dug began to turn into a quagmire so we dug a small trench on the side away from the house and ensured it ran down hill and then I dug an additional trench towards one of the ponds, which by now is full of broken concrete and used it as a soak away.

By now we we had done most of the jobs outside that we wanted to do (although the aborist still has to cut down some trees) and started to concentrate on the house itself, in particular, enabling the scaffolding to be put up.