Joel and two of his employees arrived at 8am, apologising profusely for breaking in yesterday, and with a truckful of briquettes for the walls. We finalised plans for exactly where the walls and doorways were to go and left them to get on with it. Once the walls were well underway, it was time for today’s scary moment – well scary hour or so; removing the huge oak beam that ran the whole width of the house and supported the roof.

Pit props were put in place to support the two other big beams that rest on the main one, which, in their turn, support the uprights, which hold the roof up. Nick and Kieran helped build scaffolding towers so Joel could use a chain saw to cut out a section of the beam at a time; being about a foot square in cross section, even short lengths were extremely heavy. Gradually, they moved along the length of the beam, removing it a metre at a time, then took away the upright supports from both ends. The house is still standing! Phew!  🙂

Kieran’s built a device to allow us to do time lapse photography; I hope you enjoy the video clip which you can watch in either 50 seconds, or more slowly, in 5 minutes. Watch especially the beam that shows at the top edge of the picture, or doesn’t, by the end.

When they weren’t working with Joel, Nick and Kieran did the plumbing in the arrière cuisine. No leaks, so we’ll buy a sink tomorrow and they’ll start assembling the kitchen units

Short version

Longer version