A few clouds around but huge patches of blue, so we went straight up to prepare for the capping of the walls. Make it sound grand and it does not seem like mixing concrete and pouring it on the walls. First we need water from the river, ballast from the trailer that we abandoned at the bridge yesterday. Then feed the reinforcement bar into the trough on the walls we made yesterday, tie all the bars together with wire to form two separate rings of steel round the top of the walls. Whack a few 10cm nails into the wall plates to tie them into the concrete and we are ready to turn ¾ of a ton of ballast and a few bags of cement into concrete to hold the walls of the building together. I was mixing and Breezy was pouring and finishing.

11.20am we took stock of where we were at and how much more material we had. We had serious doubts that we had enough to finish the job in one go, which is the ideal. Too late now for one of us to head off for more ballast, (as everywhere is shut 12-2), so all we could do was crack on and go down the valley after lunch. I was conscious of every slight spillage of ballast and concrete and Breezy was being as economical as possible.

By 2pm we had run out of ballast completely, run out of water and emptied a bag of cement so we had none left open. But we had completed the walls! We even had to go get more water from the river to clean all the buckets and tools etc.

Had lunch and then set to using Ekke’s jig saw, cutting holes in a perfectly good floor to fit a toilet and a hole in the end of the solar box we made to accept a pipe. Finished off moving slate down towards the outhouse and grading it as we stacked it, ready to go on the roof.

Opened a bottle of white to celebrate capping the walls, both exhausted.