Digging!

This weekend we have been digging out the last floor - in the middle barn which will eventually be the lounge. I don't normally do digging! I just can't really do it - must be a girl thing. Bob and I have an agreement that he does the digging and I make the curtains - seems fair to me!! But I thought I'd better help and so I've been digging shovelling, pickaxing and everything too - I'm just not as good at it as Bob. Knackered now I can tell you!

Wow, just had to nip outside (it's 10.45pm) to look at a baby owl making a very peculiar noise in a tree really close by. We managed to pick it out with the torch and it just stayed there bobbing around and squarking. Brilliant! Not quite sure what flavour owl it was, but probably tawny as they are usually around.

Anyway, back to the mundane. The floor is now at about the right level. We'll have to get the building inspector out - it seems that any time you dig a hole, they want to see it. I expect he'll be here about 30 seconds - we always feel a bit guilty that we're wasting their time, but we'd be in trouble I suppose if we didn't call them. Next will be to whacker it (with a whacker-plate to compact it), then a layer of sand followed by the plastic sheet for damp-proof, 3" of insulation and then concrete.

Whenever we're doing anything like this, we always thing we might just find buried treasure. So, we found an old axe head (don't get excited - not bronze age or anything), a pitchfork head, a heart-shaped piece of copper (don't know what that was from, but it's quite heavy and about 3" high), the remains of a leaded light window and some broken bottles . . . guess we can't retire in luxury yet then! Weirdest find yet was tonnes of porn magazines and tapes which had been dumped in bin liners in the leanto at the end of the house - the whole place was about two feet deep in them - they'd obviously been there a while. Wonder what the story was there?!