REW1 - R.I.P.

What a week.

I've had a busy week back at work. Nick had a really good couple of days ramming Mon & Tues with friends helping and they finished on a high on Tuesday.

But ... our foam glass base has failed. We were using it as a thermal break - so the cold from the slab couldn't travel up the wall. It has massive compressive strength, but we were warned to be careful on the first few levels of ramming as it does not withstand point impact. We were careful. but ...

Nick and Michael were taking all the shuttering off yesterday and I had a lovely telephone call at lunch time - the wall looked amazing. The undulation of the layers was nicely visible, the archaeology looked great, the finish was fantastic. But it turned out that the bottom layer of shuttering and rib had been preventing the damaged base from moving and as soon as it came off the wall fell.

I can't imagine what it must have been like for Nick watching all that hard work topple. It was pretty devastating seeing the aftermath on my return.

There's a few things we're glad of:

• no one got hurt
• it happened straight away - not later
• we went unstablised so we have a pile of earth, not concrete to sort out
• it was freestanding within the house so our design and build is safe without it
• we know that the rammed earth part of our effort at least worked brilliantly

The plan at the moment is we will make a whole lot of calls on Monday and see what the implications are of holding the build up for a couple of weeks and see if we can start again. sigh. Our architects are looking into a different type of base - probably engineering blocks or similar and we will put up with the thermal bridge. And poor Nick has got up early this morning to go and start moving the earth again. 

We're both feeling the weight of disappointment and failure. I'm really hoping we can build it again in the next few weeks. The thought of all that work and stress again is awful but in the long run I think it will feel like much more of a victory. So, on we go.