Getting down and dirty

A long day today but we achieved a lot. As will be the plan for the next few days Klaus & Eduardo continued taking up the floors in the six rooms that we will renovate this summer. The plan is that we will install underfloor heating in these rooms. Also three of the rooms will be bathrooms so we also need to put in the drainage and water pipes. Yesterday the first room took longer than expected because of the old floor we found hidden under the 17th century tiles. Today we found that in he next two rooms the clay floor tiling had been laid directly onto the earth! We did not even need the jack hammer to break them up. So not only was easy to lift them, we managed to save most of them for re use.

Meanwhile in the little building next to the windmill Mark & Michelle set about repairing a small part of the wall that had collapsed inside. I had noticed this December and put it down as one of the first jobs for the summer. When Mark removed all of the bricks that had come out we realised that there was a small chimney in this wall where it was coming apart - we think due to ivy on the outside. Previously it had been repaired but not very well. So we will do the job properly this time! 

Whilst all this was going on I amused myself elsewhere. In the room where we had found a much older floor under the 17th century floor I decided to explore and see if there was a 3rd even older floor deeper down. So I set about digging further down. Immediately I was finding big stones, some cut and shaped so obviously building rubble.  Also a few red tile remnants were coming up. I started to get excited, imagining that an even older building had stood here and at some point collapsed before being built over. I kept excavating deeper and deeper hoping to come across another floor. Sadly after 60 or 70 cm the stones stopped appearing and I hit normal dark earth. 

This little room is something of a conundrum. It it right at the end of the west wing and is small, only 5 x 4 metres but has a very large (and old)  fireplace that seems out of place. The fireplace is not in the centre of the room which is unusual. The room is not accessible

from the main chateau as it does not have any internal doors, just one from the outside. There are floors from two different periods above lots of old building rubble. The little room that it attaches to (but does not connect to) only had a floor from the 17th century. I am starting to think that way back in the past there was some sort of building(s) here that was separate form the chateau we see today. Then in the 15th or 16th century this building was knocked down or fell down perhaps just leaving a large chimney which was then incorporated into the small room. I doubt I will ever get to the bottom of it.