I was hoping that we would get the windows in today, but Ray wanted to dig. So I let him. I barrowed and tipped.
The pipe I found last week is a land drain. No idea where it goes to, but it is on a bed of solid clay, which is obviously why it was put in in the first pace. It is possible that it is older than the house - it might have been put in when these were fields. Ray tried to see ow thick the clay bed is, but a hole a foot deep showed no sign of becoming soil again. It could be metres thick.
That's not exactly going to help drainage, is it? So we now have a hole 3m x 1.2m, 0.85m deep. If I have a foot of soil on top of it, we shall have a 1.6 m^3 void, or enough to hold 20mm of rainfall.
I rang Kevin the BCO and told him where we had got to, and when I told him we had hit clay and the size of the hole, there were no sharp intakes of breath through puckered lips, so I hope he will pass it. He is coming next week.
Ray wanted to finish early today, but we did have time to fit the outside glazing bars to make the rebates. I've decided to set them back 40mm from the front, which will give me plenty of room to sort out shutters, in due course.
We've both got other things to do for a few days, so there will be a bit of a hiatus.