March 6th 2020

[H] After the drama of bringing the house down we spent the whole of Tuesday and Wednesday working through the rubble to break it up and strip out all the steel reinforcing that was embedded in the lumps of concrete. With both Mike’s digger and a large pecker going and Malcolm assisting with a second, smaller pecker attached to Kubi, it was pretty noisy. Petr (a Czech who’s lived in the valley for 12 years and does gardening jobs in the summer and works for Mike in the winter) was darting in and out of the diggers pulling out long lengths of twisted rebar and strips of metal. He was also tasked with picking out the stone and I helped him retrieve the smaller bits and then chisel off the worst of the mortar before stacking them in piles in the garden. Some of the stones are ridiculously heavy and I had to leave all the larger ones to Petr because I just physically couldn’t move them! Goodness knows how he managed to shift what he did, and he was at it all day from early start to late finish with hardly a break. I was knackered after a couple of hours! Oh, and Malcolm got to have a go driving the BIG digger!

Now we’ve got a 'tidy' large pile of rubble where our house used to be and Mike’s next job is to bring in a crusher and crush it all down to hardcore for us. He’ll be back to do that “soon” - Monday perhaps?!