Thank you to Alex, who came and helped us on saturday afternoon. His time was mostly spent digging this hole: Unfortunately, the reason he spent all afternoon digging this hole, is the enormous lump of concrete we discovered just below ground level! The 100x100 square hole in the top reveals it to most likely be an old foundation for a long-since-removed fence. Luckily, we discovered the right-hand extent of it just there in the photo, but the left-hand extent is not yet known. We extended the trench 1m to the left and still havent found it, which is worrying as that's where our foul drain pipe is going. But anyway, significant progress on our services trench.

If you're wondering where the spoil went:
That'll save us a tonne of gravel. Literally.

Before Chief arrived, we altered this corner of our rainwater drain run:

You can see the old 90 degree corner, replaced with a 90 degree junction and a rodding eye. This will allow us to unblock the rest of the drain run, should it ever get blocked, as you cant rod around a sharp 90 degree corner like that.

We also added extra battens to the bathroom wall, and Emma added all of the extra battens to the wall between the low roof and high roof (on the roof, just around the corner from this photo):

And then with Al's help, we added the mesh to the high level wall:

I've decided to tuck the EPDM inside what will be the finished face of render, although Im still undecided as to whether that's the best thing to do or not. We will have plastic roof edge trims to fix after the rendering is complete, and these will finish both the aesthetics and the waterproofing.