Weekly Update

I've not updated the blog in the last week so here goes:

Kevin Furniss dug drains around the outside of the barn and laid agricultural drainage pipes in the trenches and then filled them in with drainage stones - appropriately enough this is known as a French drain, Kevin used a grading laser (the yellow equipment in the foreground) to ensure that the drains had a fall to take the water away around the barn.

Drainage pipes along the north side of the house and barn

After this there was a slightly anxious wait for the inspector from Veolia to come and inspect the Fosse installation, all the trenches had been left open for this inspection. The inspector found the same discrepancy in the Etude de Sol that Kevin had (the length of the drainage trenches had two different values). Skilfully he argued that the fosse was the same size as the one for the house that had been signed off by ....... Veolia - brilliant! This sort of unanswerable logic usually works well in France with any sort of officialdom and Monday was no exception. So Team Furniss were able to close up the trenches:

Finola completes the raking of the fosse bed after the trenches have been filled, Kevin is finishing the new talus line constructed with the spoil from the barn excavation.

Final touches - after a bit of grass seed this will look exactly like it did before.

Meanwhile Adam started work on carving the stonework for the new lucarnes

Kevin was on-site for just under three weeks, apart from a couple of rainy mornings we were blessed with dry weather which meant that the heavy machinery was able to move around site without churning up the ground too much. Right on cue the rain started just before the lowloader picked up the digger. Next day we had heavy rain and the drains started taking water away from the barn walls at an impressive rate - we had found the original barn drains built from concrete pipes and ducted our outputs into them. Although they are probably more than fifty years old they are clear and work very efficiently.

Furniss Terrassement http://www.brittanydiggerhire.com/ did a great job and have made a big difference to the project. Things aren't always straightforward with a renovation project on a 200 year old building and Kevin dealt with the problems we found in a way that was sympathetic to the building and produced a good solution.