Casing filled, bathroom window started

The concrete casing (looking south east)

You may remember from this post that the engineer told us to case the top of the bedroom door as there was too much weight from the roof bearing down on the two joists that were precariously situated over the door frame. It has been cased for quite a while now (March), but we never got around to actually filling it with concrete to finish the job. Yesterday (2013-05-04), we finally got it done. Uli mixed the concrete down below and I bucketed it in and filled the casing. I thought it would be possible to get it in with a trowel, but that quickly turned out to be very impractical, as there was only a small gap between the top of the casing and the joists. The fastest way of getting the thing filled was by hand, with gloves. After two mixes, it was finished. A couple of minutes of beating with a hammer to get the air out, and it now seems to be ok. We'll keep the casing on for another while until the concrete sets a bit. Incidentally, the engineer said that for C20/25 concrete (which is the standard required for load bearing structures like that), 28 days is the minimum curing period.

After getting the casing filled, I went to work on the bathroom window. You can see on the "before/after" pictures below, that the staircase wall (which was done with ytong blocks) was built in such a way that it obscured half of the window. We decided to move the window to the left (looking out). The first thing to do was brick up the half of the window that was obscured and make a new reveal. Using the "Reichsformat" bricks we brought back from Raiffeisen in Taufkirchen, I got this job done as well. What needs to be done next is that a lentil needs to be added on the outside and the inside, to support the bricks between the top of the window and the underside of the wallplate. This will be a bit tricky, but should be possible. We'll be busy the next couple of days with stripping the roof, so that job will probably not get done until next week (at least).

Before

After