Our normal digger driver was busy, so we decided to hire a self drive machine for a week, and see how we got on. There was some general tiding up work to do around the place, where there was plenty of space to practice and make mistakes. From this we moved onto using the machine to take away the stone as we took a wall down.

Now it was time to dig the foundation trenches in the shippon. Two of the old walls were staying, and we were going to build an inner skin of block work to rest the roof on. There was some building regulations thing where an old stone wall has zero strength, because its not possible to measure how much strength it does have.

One of the walls we were keeping had a massive crack in it, so we convinced the planners we could remove that bit, and rebuild it. The bit we removed was about 50mm bigger than the 3 tonne excavator we had hired - which was lucky. We started to dig the trenches inside the house, the following pictures show one of the kids helping drive the machines.

Oe of the walls we were keeping needed to be undermined in order to get enough depth of concrete. Also there was a massive amount of dirt to shift out, and very little room to move. The slow and careful technique of digger driving we had was making the going very slow. Having seen a professional driver at work I knew that there was a significant skill gap, that given enough time we could overcome, but with hire charges time was money. I phoned every digger driver in the phone book, my luck was in, my normal driver knew a local farmer who had a machine - Emrys. He came round and quite literally rescued us. The following pictures show a distinct change of style. The job was finished in about 5 hours. I was scared he was going a bit too hard at the job, especially when he drive up his spoil heap.

All done, you can see in this picture how far below the bottom of the wall we dug out. The concrete would come back up to above the bottom of the wall, so as long as we got it in quick we were going to be OK. This is the only time I have had sleepless nights on this project.

The strings are being used to mark out the lines of the walls.