Having settled in and made space for ourselves, the summer was passing and attention turned to the renovation works. We decided to focus on securing and renovating the existing cottage before the winter and leave aside any extension plans for later. The first priority was to repair the stonework and secure the structure against weathering and damp. Some of the existing external walls were in poor condition, where crumbling mortar, creepers and some hard winters had created holes and cracks. There was also a small problem of penetrating damp, although by no means a serious one. There were two big jobs to do, improving the drainage to keep surface water away from the walls and protecting the walls themselves.
For the groundwork, we decided to dig French drains on all four sides of the cottage. These would be trenches dug two feet below floor level, and the same from the walls (under the line of the thatch). The trenches are filled with loose stone and a permeable membrane material, holding a perforated percolation pipe, running off in another trench down the slope of the garden to a soak pit, filled in a similar way. We would scrape back by hand at a gentle angle from the base of the walls into the trench, drawing any surface water into it and, in effect, putting the house on a dry island (we hoped). At the same time, we would scrape and level around the garden, add an inspection hatch to the sewer then, later on, top out with decorative pebble paths around the house. What looked like a big job took a couple of men a couple of days with a digger, a dumper truck, 60m of piping and a couple of loads of stone. An essential piece of work but surprisingly little trouble or cost in the overall scheme of things.
The excavation was revealing. We knew the plot was well drained on the surface but it was a surprise to dig into completely dry soil at the rear of the house (and in damp weather). There were no damp signs around the old walls of the cottage but we unearthed trouble with the more recent block gable wall. Excavating here revealed the poor construction, with earth banked above floor level and no rendering on the lower block work. Not only was the wall facing the worst of the weather, it was waterlogged and porous at floor level. This explained where the damp was coming from. We scraped back the worst of the concrete render here, levelled and sloped the ground around the drain trench, leaving the wall render for the next job.
