The terrassement work started this week on the project (terrassement means anything that needs big earth moving machinery). The equipment arrived on-site late on Tuesday evening and Kevin Furniss of Furniss Terrassement started work on Wednesday morning in the barn and very carefully took out a trench inside the north wall to enable us to examine the condition of the wall on that side.
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The barn is an old building and DTU Normes (Building Control Regulations in the UK) hadn't even been dreamt about when it was built - quite possibly by a macon who couldn't read or write. So he did what he thought was reasonable or adequate or quickest when he got started. Which means on the lower side of the building he built a very neat stepped out stone foundation to support the wall, nice regular blocks solidly built. On the north side however when he reached a hard solid sandy gravel bed he clearly felt that would be good enough so he stopped digging foundations and set the wall directly on the sand. Looking along the sides of the walls on the outside it's clear that the barn has settled a bit in places - but not by much. Now however the new floor we are installing means that there will be a lot of excavation inside the building and so examining the wall and subwall conditions were crucial. The first section was just about acceptable as we have decided to put a step in this end of the barn to deal with the existing level change in the floor. On Thursday morning Kevin used his concrete breaker to open up the floor in the section around the existing small door and along to the lean to, this revealed a very different situation. There's almost no subwall under the doorway and the support pillar next to it and very little along the rest of the wall. After some consideration we decided to build a reinforced concrete support for the inside of the wall and used the trailer to bring in two and a half tonnes of sand and gravel from the quarry and then in an evening run to Leroy-Merlin in Vannes another 500kg of cement and steel reinforcing beams. Adam set to on Friday morning constructing the shuttering and reinforcement to hold the cement and by lunchtime the whole construction was ready:
Working in relays with Barbara managing the mixer, Adam supervising the concrete delivery and compaction and myself running backwards and forwards with barrow loads of mixed concrete we mixed two tonnes in four hours and laid in the supporting beam:
The final result (pics to follow) looks like a neat shelf along the inside of the walls. The intention of this support for the wall is to ensure that the wall and any of the ground underneath it doesn't get any ideas about moving in the future. The section under the doorway will become the step down from the doorway into the barn and the longer section along the wall will become a feature of some sort - suggestions welcome!!
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