Important day today – the building materials cometh. Of course we are again delayed going to the house from Raveloe with the needs of pregnant wives and toddlers. Mrs Revivalist is due at the midwife’s this morning so again Mr X and I head off in the morning alone.
As it happens the builders merchants lorry has come quite early and indeed is just pulling up as we are. So mad dash across the road out of Mr X’s car and I jump into Ethel, our 1966 Morris Minor convertible which I’ve been using to block the space outside our house out of the way of the truck.
Using the great telescopic arm the driver drops the bricks, blocks, sand, aggregate and cement into our garden over the wall, but only just. The lorry looked like it wanted to tip over when dropping the bricks!
That done, on with work indoors. I dug out the last few inches of the curved wall foundation in the hall while Mr X cleared up rubble from yesterday’s mess.
That done, I mixed and poured two loads of concrete into the hole, which was just right, only spilling a little bit on our lovely tiled floors. Hopefully it will set in time for Mr G to lay some bricks tomorrow.
The ladies arrived just I was doing a second pour, with cheese toasties and vimto in tour, which was nice. Those eaten, we gave Mrs X and the children a tour, and she agreed with the general consensus that the house was big, and would be nice when finished.
Deciding the house was far too dangerous for toddlers and too dusty for ladies they soon left, leaving us to do the demolition. I concentrated on Disassembling the door frames for reuse later while Mr X wielded the mighty sledgehammer and took down the walls. Filthy work, given it was largely 100 year old lath and plaster.
Fascinating to find embedded in the walls was the original piping for the gas lights the house would have had when new. Sad they couldn’t survive as relics, alas but the wall was already destroyed when we found them, vertical pipes coming up from the floor in the walls with a right angle pointing into the room at about eye height. I don’t know if they would have been lights themselves or gas keys to control the flow. Given they were single pipes, I imagine sconces.
Destruction wrought but very little tidying done (all left for me tomorrow!) We headed home via the Inn. Potroast Chicken and Soplica for dinner.
Was going to head off to the house early tomorrow, but Mrs Revivalist’s new midwife has demanded she go for a scan at hospital tomorrow as she’s concerned baby isn’t growing fast enough.
Not what you want…
The Young Revivalists 