Walls

They have built three of the bike-shed walls. The walls to the left and right will act as retaining walls to the garden. The wall at the front will be into the carport. At the rear the black plastic is a layer that will go against the footings on the actual garden wall, and against it they will pour a lot of concrete to guarantee that the wall stays where it is, now that they have dug around it's footings. The garden wall is at least 200 years old and though quite deep doesn't have modern foundations, so you need to be careful with them.

The height of the concrete blocks will be the extent of the concrete on three sides, the rest will be finished in timber, but the back wall, will have concrete blocks built on it. The old wall will then be obscured by the back wall of the bike shed, which is why over the past few weeks my wife has been re-pointing it while we have access to it.

For the curious the red snake is the conduit which will allow power from the PV panels that will form the roof or the bike-shed and carport to make their way back to the house, where they will connect to the mains - eventually. Given the price of electricity at the moment - it's gone up 4% this year in France - I'm glad we're have the panels installed. I expect it to keep going up, and our house doesn't have mains gas and is old and not that thermally efficient, even if we've done our best on these renovations.