Mud, machines & maximum stress

Apart from the anxious weeks while we were waiting for planning permission, I can honestly say I’ve enjoyed every moment of the restoration of Bossiney Court, up until now.

We are currently going through what I hope will be the worst part of the process: digging the drains which will carry water away from the house and the boreholes which will bring heat and water into the house. These two things are happening simultaneously, along with some internal structural work, and so we have noise, confusion and chaos all around us.

Behind the veg garden three men from Celtic Drilling are standing around a Mad Max-style drill, which steadily bores down through the slate until it hits water. The drill is air powered and somewhat noisy, but not excessively so. Each borehole takes roughly one day to drill. They need to dig three boreholes to a depth of 105 metres in order to supply the heat required by the Kensa heat pump, which will eventually heat our much better insulated and ventilated home. They are also digging an additional borehole for water, which we will certainly use for watering our vegetables, and hopefully, once it has been properly filtered and treated, we will use it for household water supply as well.

In the walled garden, our multi-talented building team are gently digging out a trench around the perimeter of the house into which they place perforated pipe which carries rainwater away from the house and into a soakaway in the lawn (this is known as a French drain). The downpipes of the new cast iron gutters have also been fitted to carry water run off from the roof into the same system. It has been raining for six weeks at this point, and yet the house feels remarkably dry – mostly due to the new guttering I think.

Out the back of the house there is maximum chaos. If I want to leave the house by the main route, I need to jump over a trench, then navigate over what feels like mountains of slate and mud, and then duck under a digger and a dumper truck. When the dogs want to go out during the day I need to escort them so they don’t get scared! There are parallel sets of trenches leading down away from the house: one to carry toilet flushings into the biodigester which we previously installed and one for the French drains on this side of the house. We also needed to connect up water discharging from the kitchen sink and dig trenches and lay pipe for future toilets and appliances once the house is completed. All in all this leads to a criss-crossing network of tunnels and pipes, a lot of head scratching and a lot of trips to Plumbase. We are getting there, with the help of Charlie our neighbour (who is the deftest digger driver I’ve ever seen) and several others who are helping out.

Finally this week they have started to backfill all of the trenches with tonnes of pea gravel and then some of the slate and mud (known locally as shillet) previously excavated. All of this needs to be approved by our local building control officer, and then we can breathe a sigh of relief and start putting our back yard back together. I will be very happy when the diggers and dumpers are gone and quiet returns to this corner of Bossiney.