Time to get on with the last major project on the house: a sunroom. This is a conservatory with a solid roof, rather than glass, and mine will be oak framed over a brick plinth with a slate roof. Here's a couple of drawings:
The back of the house has looked like this for 4 or 5 years, awaiting this project. The left hand double door leads into the lounge, and the right hand one services the kitchen:
I did some basic setting out, and cut the sand & cement temporary surface to the line of the outside of the brickwork, using an angle grinder:
I did a little hand digging, setting out the line of the retaining wall. This project is somewhat complex with the changes of level involved, curved retaining wall, ramp, and so on. The footprint is about 3.3m x 6m, and I am going to build it on a reinforced raft. There is no need for a building inspector to be involved, as it is an unheated external space, separate from the house with an external door between.....so the raft is simply my own design.
Those of you with good memories might remember that I fitted the lead flashing for this sunroom 3 or 4 years ago when I rendered the house. It might be longer ago than that, and you can see it below the left hand two windows.
I hired this little 3 ton machine for the day:
I had a biggish job to do in the garden with it first, so I started on the sunroom excavation around lunchtime. First, I scraped off the temporary sand & cement "patio" surface:
This is the state of play after I finished with the digger. It was pretty rough, as I only had access from one side, and had to pull all the spoil towards me and drag it backwards into a corner of the veggie patch, like this:
It's all in rock-hard clay, which tore roughly rather than cut neatly, but I didn't do an awful job with the digger, and best of all, I didn't put a bucket through the doors!
Slow going. Anyway, today I spent all day with a shovel, spade and mattock, and straightened everything out by hand:
Note the build-up at the far end of the excavation. The far wall will act as a retaining wall, with only 2, or maybe 3, courses of brick above ground level.
Here's an idea of the levels. Note the top of the house foundations. Note also that the top of slab is the top of the brick step at the door threshold, so you can see the thickness is about 160mm, except at the edges where is is a further 100+mm deep. There will then be 50mm of insulation, 70mm of screed, and then stone to come level with the existing:
This project is going to be in fits and starts though the summer, so don't expect rapid progress.