Here you can see the trench for the foundations of the kitchen extension - a modest structure, just a single-storey extension at the back of the old building, but one which will make our daily life much easier!

The back-hoe, which broke up the concrete and did so much of the hard digging, can be seen in the background.

Work started yesterday on the second part of our project, a modest extension to our kitchen.  It has had the intersting side-effect of exposing the foundations of the existing building - and it is indeed interesting to compare them with our new work.

This picture tells the story.  The bricks of the foundations to the old house are 1.2 metres deep, with the bricks resting on concrete which is 60mm thick at its thickest, but generally about 30mm thick, and about 30mm wider than the bricks themselves  This is resting on the white clay soil.

On the other hand, the foundations of the new building, and of this extension, are 1.8 metres deep.  The bricks rest on a footing of reinforced concrete (containing ten longitudinal reinforcing rods and regular lateral rods) that is 400 mm thick and 1,000mm wide, resting on a layer of gravel placed over the clay soil:  massive by comparison.

In another place, the old foundations do descend 1.8 metres like our new construction, but again they rest on very thin concrete, and in this place that concrete footing is no wider than the bricks themselves.

The old building has stood up very well over the twenty-five years since its erection:  we can expect at least as good a performance from this new one.

Once again, I'll let the pictures tell most of the story.  The huge pump and boom truck was most impressive ... and a bonus for us was that we were able to use some left-over concrete to mend a washed-out portion of our driveway.  As I write, the bricklayers are already laying the bricks for the walls of the upper storey.

To give you a break from progress on the new building, here are some photos of the latest additions to our community:  Don (the black one) and Rascal (the tabby).  The truth is that we had a problem with mice in the larder.  Although the cute duo haven't actually caught anything yet, their mere presence seems to have banished the mice, where traps, poison and glue all failed.  Thanks, kittens!

The pictures below show the steady progress we are making with the building:  the ground-floor walls are up, and we are nearly ready to pour the concrete floor of the first storey...

Below, you will see that one of our neighbour's dogs enjoys the sand pile, while one of the bricklayers passes on the craft to his little som