On our own over Christmas, just us to sort things. There was a visit on 23rd from Julian and Steve to finish the drainage to the giant drive soakaway but other than that just us. We had a day off on Christmas day which we spent with my folks in Gosport, but otherwise we were toiling, from morning until it got dark, every night.
Days followed a pattern - get up, decent breakfast, then drive to site. Clothed in waterproof trousers and coats and warm clothes, with a big flask of coffee. We'd toil on site with Andy working and me tidying, fetching him tools, running errands, lugging stuff about and doing what I could, but most of the work was done by him. We'd get home, remove filthy clothes, hoover the carpet to get rid of the mud and the bits of polystyrene that clung to everything due to it getting everywhere when cutting the EPS insulation, have showers, then hibernate for the evening. The series of choice has been The West Wing (never watched it originally)! We allowed ourselves lots of treat food - chocolate, snacks. Lots of non- alcoholic beer to guzzle down every night when we got home thirsty, and we were falling asleep on one glass of wine. Some nights we slept well, others we awoke in a panic. We allowed ourselves to be awake at night and talk, and not get stressed about being awake. Tried to stay calm.First Andy was clearing out the cavity to get rid of the 'snots' of firmly dried mortar, using various tools. Then trying to fit the EPS70 polystyrene insulation, which proved ridiculously time consuming as the cavity was not a continuous size all the way down, and each piece had to be shaped by saw individually, negotiating the wonky wall ties. And arranging the wide DPC, and finding some of it had been fitted by the brickies under the wrong bits of wall. Total nightmare. What we hoped would be a job for a couple of days took about 7 person-days in total. Part way round Andy realised we just wouldn't finish it in time, and we came up with plan B, which involved getting a load of better spec PIR insulation that was thinner. Cue frantic googling to find somewhere that would sell the thinner sheets, that was open over the Christmas period (most places weren't), that had them in stock, that could deliver fast. It felt like every single idea we had to solve things had several extra constraints thanks to the timing, or the weather, or something out of our control. We had a trip to Jewson on 27th December to trial a couple of different thicknesses to test which would work, and Andy sawed up the two sheets on site only to find they wouldnt fit in the car lengthways as hoped, so continued to saw them up and we came home with a car jammed to the ceiling. Ended up with very filthy car. But the answer to our question - we needed 80mm to make the rest of the job doable. We ordered the appropriate number of sheets and to our relief they were delivered the next morning.
Meanwhile I'd been baling out water from massive puddles on site. The chalk had turned into liquid slush. The rain had finally calmed down but the site wasn't drying out in any hurry. I swept out the garage to find a problem with the garage floor, which had been under water for weeks. I spent hours baling water off the DPM that was already down, and the tarpaulins we'd been using to cover the insulation where it wasn't. Didn't want water to just sit on the polystyrene, surely that wouldn't have been any good. I did this every day.
We were battling daily, but kept saying we're still making progress. Just not fast enough.
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