The Renovation: Updates..

The new floor is in, took an afternoon of mixing and lots of overcomplicated pipes and bits of styrofoam wedges to get it level, I let Maria's father do the spreading etc, and didn't want to get in his way, so it was done his way.

Personally I would never have done it that way but ho-hum!

The reinforcing was way to low to the ground, as otherwise his pipes would be too high to level it at 8cm height. But it's all done and dusted now...

The damp proof coursing, and the polystyrene bits to prop up the reinforcing (which subsequently got squashed due to people walking on the mesh, and the wheelbarrow rolling up and down the planks ontop of the mesh.....

Concrete in:

that was two days ago, we started moving bricks from the stack about 300M down the road to another property where he wants to use them for constructing a new garage, a painstaking chore involving a 2 wheel tractor and a little trailer capable of holding 400KG... must have been over 30 trips, luckily I only did 10 or so of them, Maria's parents did the rest, whilst I worked away today.

I needed to remove the old wall in order to tie into the new wall, with the beam above the new opening going to the kitchen.

First, I had to find all the electrics and figure out where in earth they went to...

So painstakingly tapping away at the wall with a hammer to reveal the pipes inside the wall.
Then, figuring out what does what, and disconnecting everything not required, the 3phase is in the top with 4 wires, the 230V is below it, then all the light switches going everywhere, and the new temporary connection I put together to re-connect the kitchen going through the wall to the other side.

Open up a junction box to find this:
It's 4 cables coming into one box, all tangled together, bits of tape separating the terminals which are twisted together and thrown in there...

So, made a hole going up, fed a new cable through, snipped everything in half and removed the pipes from the wall that's coming down, removed all excess light cables and switches, and connected the 3phase and 230V kitchen run back up.