… today. It’s a Bank Holiday here tomorrow and I owe myself a couple of days off.
However instead I went downstairs and made a start on enlarging the battery box. And by the time I knocked off, the base had been finished and all concreted in.
I had to rake out the under-floor next to where the existing battery box finishes. And once I had done that, I needed to level it off. Next job was to make up a framework for the extension and lay that into position.
You can’t simply concrete within the framework as the damp will be through there in minutes. Remember that this is the original problem with the flooring that led to me digging it out. There has to be a damp-proof membrane underneath and that can’t be laid flat on the floor as the rough surface will puncture it. I sifted some of the rubble that I had dug up and ended up with a pile of soft damp sand. That made a good cover over the rough surface and then I could put dow
The damp-proof membrane needs a layer of sand on it too. Putting stones onto it for a base might puncture the membrane from above otherwise. And so I sifted another load of rubble to produce more damp sand and that all went over the membrane.
All of the stone that I had removed made a good hardcore base, and then I mixed four or five buckets of concrete which filled it all up nicely. Even nice was that I finished just five minutes before knocking-off time too.
But to give you some idea of the kind of dampness with which we are dealing here, I had to remove part of the framework for the floor of the old battery box. And that was rotten as a pear in places.
This floor really is damp and that’s the reason that I’m going for the suspended flooring here.
