This week had some nice surprises. Above the old pigsty there used to be a hayloft and this hay needed to be removed.

But before I started clearing out the hayloft, I continued plastering my project wall:

Then it was time to start this dirty job. I knew there was a hayloft above the original pigsty, but I didn’t expect that there was so much hay left. I was wrong. There was about a 50 cm thick layer of hay and dust left! It was a real dusty unpleasant adventure to remove all this dirt.

In wintertime it was never really cold in this room. Now I know why, the 50 cm hay was the perfect insulation for the pigsty. I know from one of my neighbours that she never saw animals over here, and she is living here since the 1960s.

So all remnants at the hayloft are older than 60 years. After a short while I found some wooden skis. I gave them to one of my neighbours ( I don’t have anything with this sport… ).

A bit later I found an old German movie magazine from 1960. This was really interesting. The magazine is complete, but not in top condition of course.

And what a miracle. In the magazine there was an article about a movie, called ‘Mistress of the world’, ‘Herrin der Welt’ in German. This movie was partly filmed at Angkor Wat, Cambodia. I lived about 2km from this temple in 2013!

Then about an hour later, digging through the hay I found a postcard from 1944 and a letter from 1943. How these got here… who knows, they were not for this address. Here’s a copy of the letter:

These finds made the clearing-out interesting, for the rest it was a very dirty job which took me almost a day — with the necessary breathing-breaks! After 95% of the hay was removed, I removed the planks and the rest of the hay and dust fell on the floor. 5 full wheelbarrow loads. What a relief that this job was done 🙂

In total I had about 45 sacks of the stuff which I brought to the local compost processing farm.

Then it was time to fill the gap above the door with concrete.

And I am going to keep the 3 beams in the ex-pigsty for the ceiling-floor support. So I brushed and sanded them. And I also filled the walls with cement at the bottom. More repairs of these walls will be done later. At the right side the stairs will come to the upper floor and at the left side I will build shelves for wood storage.

Not yet sure about these stairs, I want to create storage in the stairs, so I started designing something in Fusion-360 and I’ll probably build this myself.

Thanks for reading this post again 🙂

またね (Until next time),
ロナルド

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