blimey o'reilly...

how the hell is it staying up? this is the part of the renovation that is really quite exciting - seeing the 'bare bones' of a building that has stood for around 100 years. this gable wall has had to come down because it's basically crumbling away, it's made of clunch* and needed to come down before it fell down. the roof is basically shot to shit too. you can see the cross sections of the floor in the upstairs bedroom and underneath the floorboards, the floor is held up by bits of tree. yes, tree. i wonder if there are any hidden treasures under the floor - when my mum and i had our fabric shop, the colour room, it was a really old building and we found little bottles wedged underneath the floor and bit and pieces in the walls. fascinating.

*clunch is, according to wikipedia:

"it is a term which encompasses a wide variety of materials, often locally variable.
it often comes as irregular lumps of rock either picked up from the fields, or it may be quarried and hewn from the ground in more regular-shaped building blocks. it is predominantly chalk/clay based and is bedded in mortar to form walls."
retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clunch"