Progress

Barry and his son Darren and the rest of the DSR guys have been working tirelessly on site to complete the demolition work, the first phase of our building plan. The stairs and internal walls have all come out, as has the top of the basement, and give or take a couple of missing bricks, the cinema is standing on her own two feet still! All that’s left to do is a tidy up on Monday, and then we can start thinking about what to do next…

We’ve now dug the trial pits to see the foundations of the building, and we think it’s great news. We were expecting to be faced with a difficult decision; either knock down the east and west walls, build foundations and rebuild the walls, or underpin the existing walls. Either choice would be a lot of work, but it looks like the cinema has been kind to us.

Not only do we think the foundations for the walls and pillars are sound and deep enough, but also, we think that the walls are thick enough to cast slab out of. If so, and we’ve passed on all the info to Chris, our structural engineer to confirm, then our build process will be LOADS simpler and therefore LOADS cheaper, and we get to keep the original walls. If so, this is REALLY GOOD NEWS!

There’ll be a wait now for our structural engineer and architects to come up with the final build plans, before we start building in earnest probably in the new year, but there’s plenty for us to do in the meantime…