With the concrete shuttering built it was time for the ready mix truck to do its thing. Given we were still in winter at the time, and it had been quite wet and we’d recently been digging the ground the truck was given strict instructions to stick to the graded portions of the land and these were clearly indicated to the driver as otherwise I feared the truck sinking into the land and becoming beached. However, despite my best intentions all my instructions were completely ignored and the driver drove straight off the graded area and duly got bogged down and stuck. This had two consequences, the first being that we had to barrow 3.5 cubic metres of concrete into the relevant shutterings rather than have them poured directly (as the mix was going off and the additional weight of it would make extraction of the truck nigh on impossible) and secondly the concrete company had to send a tele-handler to drag the now empty truck out of the mud. Anyway in amongst all of this shenanigans the concrete was installed and tamped to a finish ready to accept paving slabs aside from the air source heat pump platform that was smoothed as it was not having any additional covering.
The concrete truck’s predicament and the concrete poured and tamped.
Once the concrete was part cured the shuttering was removed and levelling of the land could continue. The idea was to also install two large raised beds in front of the barn to add colour to the eventual property and this work was undertaken as part of this exercise. These were created out of oak sleepers set into the ground and lined with damp proof membrane before they were filled with soil. The land was then made good around them in preparation for the driveway to be weed matted and gravelled.
The land all tidied up and the raised beds being constructed.
Originally it had been hoped that the brickwork might be able to be made good enough to leave unpainted or unrendered, but the amount of different brick types and the quality of some of the coursework in the original build, combined with our patching meant that while from a distance it looked okay close up it was clearly not that great. Additionally, the west wall had been rendered at some point and when we removed this prior to our rebuilding work some of the facing on the bricks got damaged so these had to be pieced in which we struggled to blend properly due to the mortar mismatch.
However, we had got it to a good enough point where we felt painting it was a good option and would make it look acceptable which was better than the prospect of having to render it so this is what we decided to do. White was the chosen colour (I am not a fan of garishly coloured masonry) and Dulux Weathershield Trade Exterior paint was chosen due to the top online reviews and reassuring expensiveness of the product... ha ha. Two coats of this were applied and standing back from it the results were rather impressive as it certainly tidied the building up and made it look clean and welcoming.
The building being painted (the driveway was also being installed by this point).
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