More dirt moving

And now we moved to the front and right of the house, where we lack space due to the acute slope. Also I plan on extending the building to the right of it, so I had to get some space there. You will see here how the bulldozer digs into the slope close to the road and then works it vertical for this extension.
All the material coming from this was pushed down the slope in orther to gain flatter space there.
























































We tried to get as near to the walls as possible to improve the drainage and keep waters away from the foundations. At this particular point, the bedrock in which the foundations of the house lay were exposed, giving an oportunity to push fresh mortar into the stones. We were worried about the road holding on, so we had to speed this process and try to build the retaining wall that came next as soon as we could.

Grading, draining... earth moving.

I had prepared forseveral weeks for this, and then it just took three days. But i had to find the guy and make him understand what I wanted exactly, get everything out of the bulldozer way, buy insulating plastic and tube line for once the ditches were dug out.
Hiring a bulldozer like this one is done by an hourly rate of 36 euros, 50 if he has to use the drilling hummer. I was very satisfied with the result, the improvement is obvious. We have flatter, wider usable area right in front of the house and also we can drive the car right to our doorstep.
We started grading the left side of the house, were it was already flatter, gathering the top soil to lay it back on top once we were finished, for the grass to grow again. He dug and push dirt to lower the back and gain elevation over the slope.


I took this picture above from the road that runs next to the house, right here the building is below the road level, and has no drainage. The next shots ilustrate the ditch we dug to put a tube line (in yellow) and protect that wall from filtrations. Once the brown plastic was laid against the wall and the tube run along the bottom was laid, we cover the ditch to grade with fine gravel. You can see how it runs around the back and left side of the house, along the wall with the big tree.

After the roof

Once the roof was finished we took on cleaning the grouts between the stones on the walls. The mortar that kept them together was very poor and crumbly, made of a mixture of regular mud with lime. New mortar will improve the binding, stabilize the walls, insulate from the outside and kill all the fauna living there namely mice, lizzards and spiders (by the thousands).
For this tedious work we started with a mechanical approach, just hand picking it out with little picks, but then the good friend Luis bought this water compressor that easied and sped the work very much, it is a 2 grand Euro machine that I could not afford just for a single job. Here you can see Jen at work with the water gun, it was so strong it would hurt you pretty bad if directed to your leg close enough.






















Also there are some other news: around this time we bought a burro, we called him "Melo" for Caramelo, he is a male and pretty young, just about eight months old. He is very sweet and likes chasing Raya around for fun, does not bite or kick and has a very natural way to mow the lawn.