Internal walls and tanking

Nipped down to the site last night to have a look at the progress.  Internal walls are half way built, both the load-bearing 6" and the partitions on the basement.  This means we can now stand in the rooms and get a real feel for the size of the floor area in each.  Up to this point the best we could do was mark off sections on the floor slab, but without the walls to catch your eye it's a struggle to imagine it properly.

As you can see the rain is back and with the elevation we're right in the clouds on this particular evening.  You can just make out the stand of trees across the road, normally from here Mt Leinster is looming in the background! This is exactly the wrong time for it as well as we're getting the retaining wall tanked - the primer paint and bituthene membrane can only go on when the wall is dry.  This weather is only forecast to last a couple of days, but really it's the worst couple in terms of the schedule over the previous and next week.

The tanking can be seen below - a layer of primer paint, a rubber-like bituthene membrane, a deck-drain board, a layer of round drainage stone and finally backfilled with earth

We're trying to get it done as together as possible - we don't want to leave any of the layers exposed for too long without backfilling to keep pressure on these layers against the wall.

Once the weather picks up we can polish off the backfill and start bringing up the levels around the house, as well as dig the foundations for the load bearing walls on the ground floor.  The slabs that sit on top of the basement are ordered for Monday.  Then we go up again.