First Floor

Well I hope to have many more floors but your first is always the best!  Seriously Derek and his gang have been very lucky with the weather as we all have.  I really could not have picked a better time to start building - no torrential and persistent downpours rendering the building site a mud bath.  Just day after day after day of beautiful British sunshine!

We are now reaching first floor level pretty much all the way around the house - that sounds odd but trust me builders have a habit of starting sections then for no apparent reason starting another section at the opposite end of the building...I thought this was to mix it up and add a little variety into what looks like a rather boring job of laying stone after stone after stone.  WELL WHAT THE HELL DO I KNOW!

The method in the madness is to ensure that all of the corners of the house are built to the same specification in terms of height from the foundations so that all of the courses of brick are perfectly horizontal.  If they didn't jump around then they could find themselves laying courses of stone around the perimeter of the house only to find that the course of stone doesn't line up - and that would look a buggers muddle!

No need to worry - Derek and Mick got all external corners to within 1mm of each other.

All of the good weather is starting to have some pretty dire effects on some of the houses that other builders are constructing.  Of particular problem and concern to me is the story that those lovely quoins have started to slide out of position on some of the other houses - specifically on south-facing walls which have been laid in hot temperatures.  Speaking to Steve and Rand & Asquith he said the solution is simple - "Frog 'em and they're goin' na-where".  Frogging is a term used to describe the hollow cup-like shape on the underside of a brick.  The frog allows the brick to be walled creating a mound of mortar underneath the frog - this raised mound (invisible to the eye) prevents the brick from sliding around - simple!

Of course but how the hell do you frog a quoin that has been cut from the earth and is as hard as bloody nails?  "Well..." said Steve, "we can frog your quoins for you for a sur-charge of £6 per quoin frogged if you like?".  "And what if I don't like?" said I.  "You can frog em y'self wi' a Stihl saw if you are handy with power tools but don't cut y' fingers off coz y'blood 'll stain the stone".  Not that I'm tight or anything but I've got ten fingers to go at - the picture below shows a frogged quoin done by moi!