We made a decision on the wall – well, Ali did. It’s going to be stone, not breeze block. He’s got enough stone, and he likes working with it, so that’s the plan.
He dug down to make space for its foundations, and to everyone’s surprise (though perhaps we should have expected it, there being quite a few quarries around here) he came across a big natural stone shelf. It stands about 2½ feet above floor level, is easily as deep and as far as we can tell it extends back into the hillside. Everyone agreed that the stone shelf should act as the retaining wall’s foundation: to remove it would be dangerous, pointless and very difficult. Keeping it there and building from the top of it saves a lot of building work up to the level it’s at.
So Ali has been digging a foundation trench to the east side of the retaining wall, for the house foundations and he needs to dig one to the west side, and the front. This is looking down onto the site, with the stone shelf in the lower left corner:
And here’s the site from another angle:
– though it’s harder to make out the stone shelf on that one.
I’m worried that it all looks like it’ll be too small for him, but he doesn’t think that’s going to be a problem and points out that he can dig out as far as he likes to the north side to make it more spacious if he wants to. I think the ‘tucked into the hillside’ part will be where he will sleep, which will be the best place in those famous howling winter gales we get up here.
Anyway, he’s ill at the moment, so no work has been done there for the past week or two. I’m still focusing on the landscaping, pulling out field junk again and sowing grass seed, patch by patch, a painful square yard at a time. I don’t want to take over his foundation-digging, because that kind of feels like his baby.
