HUGE update. We've been off work all last week, hence no updates, and we hired a digger and a dumper to do various external works. Here's Emma on her dumper truck: And here's my brother on the digger:

First of all we had to clear all the bits of broken render, and the massive pile of earth that came out of our foundations. It took several days to do that. Then we dug the soakaway in the back garden, then we dug the drainage trench through the drive, you can see this here:

note that in this picture it looks like utter carnage. This is not in any way deceptive! We also had to fell some more trees and clear all that rubbish, then our building inspector came and inspected the new foul drain, with the instruction that we had to insert a rodding eye halfway down, just after the bend you can see in the photo. We did this the day it rained, which was not fun. We'd organised a 20T load of gravel for Friday afternoon, which we knew was setting ourselves a tight deadline, so we had to work fast getting the drain filled in and protected over with paving slabs. Then gravel boards, stakes, and a double-layer of geotextile to form the drive:

Then in came the lorry, flattening everything in its path, including next-door's paving slabs which we will have to replace. This is what twenty tonnes of gravel looks like when it's all just dumped in a pile:

Eventually we got it looking like this:Its still quite uneven - making things flat is the hardest thing you can do with a digger as the bucket wants to make an arc all the time - but we have the top course to come so we'll put up with it for a bit.

We also finished the doors for the media unit in the living room, and plumbed in the toilet which is now fully working.