25-VIII-2016.
In the morning, majstor Mile called to say that the middle wall between the two main rooms in the front was kind of crumbling and that he's just going home to get the supporting beams. Asking what should he do, well, told him "you know the stuff better than I do, just solve it the best you can". He should already know that I don't mind the cost (having accumulated lots of cash so far).
We came in the afternoon to pick up the plums, apples, pears, peppers, cucumbers and perhaps some more tomatoes (already got 150kg of those, got 100 bottles of juice upstairs, more than half of it being last year's). Two bad news: when majstor Mile was paving around the well, he destroyed the gooseberries. They just bore fruit this year. The other news is the wall can't be solved, it fell. Luckily, they already put two (out of four) supports in place, and nobody was hurt. By the time we got there, they already took out all of the clay and soil and were pouring concrete into the foundation of the wall.
The cause of the fall was the clumsy way it was all built, and the worse fix that was applied. The walls didn't quite connect, the second room was added when the first was already in place. It's visible on this shot, the crack follows the missing wall to the left of it, then veers a meter away on top. It's worse on the other side, along the most of it one can insert a whole hand.
There was once a door between the two rooms, we saw the shape of it as the clay was of different color, but then they built the hall around the rooms, and made a second door from the gateside room to the hall. And this door between the rooms was then filled with... not quite clay, there was lots of fertile black soil. And it wasn't thoroughly tamped either, there were thin places, specially in the corners, or where it connected to the first room. On top of that, despite having a tall foundation, the house started soaking moisture from the ground - there was no cutoff layer. So they beat off some 7cm off the bottom edges and filled that with upright brick - with plastic foil between the clay and the brick. Which didn't stop the moisture, just kept it in the middle for a number of years. The moisture made the clay swell, and it started pushing the bricks, which I noticed and told majstor Mile to fix, thinking it's just clay that needs to be cut off. He scraped the mortar (or just mud) off and found these bricks and foil. And removed them. The walls started to dry, and the weakest one, the one separating the two big rooms, fell. It held so far on sheer thickness, it was 70cm thick. That's 8m3 of clay and soil. Luckily, he was there and provided support for the ceiling and roof. He had a couple right on, just went for more to make sure it held.
By calculation, we'd need about 3000 bricks to replace the wall, which we won't do. Told him to make a pillar in the middle, where the beams holding the ceiling and the roof meet, and join it with outer walls with two arches. They won't do anything for a week, as the walls still need more time to properly dry.
Mentions: majstor Mile, in serbian