Sloop // Demolition

Let the demolition begin!

BANG! BANG!

SCRAPE!

CLANG! BANG!

Back of the house cleared.

Same with front of the house.

And of course you can use an old fence as reinforcement for a concrete slab. (No you can't.)

And some more things you cannot do: having the electric system of the workshop connect with a cable that you pour into the concrete slab, next to a water conduit. Or have a mains box with 32 A fuses, but wires that are intended for 6 A only. The electrician mentioned "méthode anglais" (he spoke French).

Want to know about the connection of the drinking water? Well, we found quite a few water conduits in the concrete slab. Some in use, some not. Apparently there are no drinking water conduits inside the house, they're all on the outside. The white pipe is Galasa, connecting to the main valve. From there there's a plastic pipe to the garage, and up through the terrace to the first floor. From that split there's a pipe back to the outside of the garage, through (in) the concrete slab, around the corner, and into the house where the gas bottles are.

This was cleaned up nicely today. Kitchen connected straight from the main valve, and no return conduit any more.

The side of the house posed a little surprise: that grill is not simply a ventilation of the cave under the kitchen:

Instead, that grill is sort of a ventilation chimney all the way to the lowest level, where the water wheel is, 6 meters down. I think this grill is a ventilation for preventing trouble when a lot of water enters the cellar, and the air needs to escape (?).

It is very lucky we found this out just before having the concrete slab at the side of the house removed with the big machine, or with pneumatic drills, as that might very wel have damaged this ancient ventilation system and the lowest cellar. The previous owners never went into the lowest cellar, so they did not know about this, and have just poured a concrete slab on top, that we now better leave in place. Removing it may do more damage than good.


Why are we doing this? Well, the house is more humid than we like. We thought with proper ventilation the house would stay dry. That is less the case than we expected. And when it rains the first cellar has water on the stairs leading into that cellar. You cannot get rid of that with ventilation.

Previous owners have poured a concrete slab all around the house, probably to get rid of water and damp, but they did it wrong. In many places the concrete slab leaned towards the walls, so instead of leading rain water away it stayed at the walls. Especially stupid: at the front door there was a big puddle of water on top of the slab, so you'd step into a few centimeters of water from within the house. Well, that water eventually seeps into the cellar. I have hacked a thin gully in the concrete slab to drain the water (see pic). That worked well when tested with a bucket of water, but it has not rained since. The previous owners must have lived with this for years. SAD!