When I arrived on site it was about an hour before the concrete was due to arrive and I found four builders busy on the separation wall which, in a morning, they had just about finished.

The first person to arrive from the concrete company was the pump man. We had arranged to close off the road for the afternoon to enable the concrete to be pumped in to the site and the pump lorry certainly did that. his first job was to lay out and connect the pipes through to the house. Rigid for most of the run and flexible fro inside the house.

When the first concrete lorry arrived the road was well and truly sealed but within les than 20 minutes the concrete was pumping. The first slug was mainly liquid so sprayed outside but then the concreting began in earnest.

Here are a couple of videos showing the process. The first one shows priming the concrete pump, the route of the pipe and then captures the initial delivery of concrete (circa 2 minutes).

This one shows the continuous pouring and levelling as they work their way back through the house.

They worked their way down the back wall but then had to stop and wait while the concrete lorry that was now empty left and its replacement arrived about 10 minutes later. We were just a little short at the end so one or two manual mixes had to be knocked up to finish it off and level the floor. Florent was continually measuring the levels with the laser and directing where the concrete had to go and finally it was finished. All bar the final tamping off.

This video shows Florent tamping the concrete with his aluminium plate carefully avoiding my service pipes. It took about 15 minutes to cover the entire floor.

Pleased with the finish product, bearing in mind this is just the sub layer of concrete. A more accurate second layer will be poured later once the underfloor heating pipes are in place.

We need to leave it for a couple of days but then we should be able to start on the internal walls and breaking out the new window openings at ground floor level.