Bad news or disaster?

The view from the caravan today

A lot of demolition got done today.  The weather continued to fluctuate between heavy showers and warm sunshine.  The wind continues cold.

The back rooms come down

The two back rooms were completely demolished and a good start was made on digging up the path around the house in order to sort out the drains. 

I spent the day either smashing up roof tiles in the raised beds with a sledgehammer or searching in all the supermarkets and the local dump for cardboard to use in the very same organic raised beds.  Consequently my arms are feeling very odd and I am feeling very rejected as apparently asking for cardboard rates on approximately the same level as asking for drugs - and it elicits more or less the same shocked response.  I also phoned the dumper people several times on Darren's behalf but the lady in the office had definitely taken against Darren and was determined to be as unhelpful as possible.

On the plus side, I doubled the size of my CD collection when my new CD arrived.  Sorry, Adele, you are not the only game in town any more.  The Seal CD was not as jaw droppingly spine tingling as Adele's masterpiece but his rendition of Stand By Me was pretty wonderful.
I did manage to get one of the raised beds covered in paper and cardboard in between heavy showers.
Darren didn't leave til around 7pm, partly because he wanted to get a lot of the demolition done and partly because he discovered that the floors in the extension are all around 20 cm thick with steel reinforcing rods all the way through.  His machine cannot possibly deal with that.  This has led him to believe that the floors in the back rooms are VERY thick reinforced concrete and could not be dug up without the use of such a large machine that we could have to knock the walls down to enable it to enter the house.

Everyone's gone home to reflect on today's findings

We can deal with the interior problems, maybe by installing the underfloor heating on top of the existing floor - the ceilings are high enough - or at least we can consider when we know the exact state of the floor.  But today's problem means that Darren can either run the drains around the outside of the demolished rooms or we can hire a proper mega enormous bit of kit and get all those external floors up now and he can do the job properly.  We are talking a few thousand euros so a big decision.
So all I had to do now was explain the situation to Chris in Angola....

I had intended to go out and have a meal tonight but I wasn't really in the mood, so I made myself something from the freezer and sat silently in the gloom, the noise from my BBC podcast drowned out by the rain.  I ran out of wine.  Not the best evening of my life.....

As they say in the film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, 'It'll be all right in the end, if it's not all right, it's not the end'