No smoke without a... chimney.

Another day, another bit of destruction. The two builders, Werner and Wally (nickname, and not sure how you spell it here), arrived this afternoon, despite supposed to being on holiday, to take the top off one of our chimneys. Top blokes, and clearly make a great team (although perhaps a little like the Odd Couple). This chimney will be removed all the way down, but just the top needed to be taken off today in preparation for the roofing work which begins next Monday. They even re-tiled the hole where the chimney was, so you'd hardly know there was ever one there! They did warn us not to hang around the back of the house too much though, just in case.

Before (or rather during).

After (when the sun came out).

In the Dachspitze, right at the top, before.

In the Dachspitze, after.

Next level down, let's call it 3rd floor, before.

And after.

And still a long way down. Cleaner than expected!

In the meantime, after removing the ceiling plasterboards in the slaughter room (I really need to stop calling it that, as it was formerly a bakehouse) to be sure there wasn't any water damage after last Friday's torrent, I'm wondering what they'll do when rebuilding the back wall. This is the wall that was an internal wall till the bathroom was knocked down, and it really needs to be rebuilt as we'll have a new placement for a door and window in this wall. The beams from the floor above span between the wall and an original, large oak beam (must be 7 metres long, spanning two rooms). Either they prop the whole lot up while rebuilding the wall, or we have to take the floor above out and reinstate it later. I'd almost prefer this, as it might give more scope to use lighter, modern material, and tank it better as the bathroom will go above.

Relatively new beams and boards, above which is concrete.