Our house is an old winemakers house so in the garage are the usual tools of the trade...Remains of an old pressoir - I believe would have looked something like this:
though ours is mounted in concrete and the juice would have run off into the little concrete tank next to it and then it would have been put into the reinforced concrete cuve next to it (you can see the tannin stains on the interior walls below)
But in came our diggers:
and now it looks like this:
This is a bit of a struggle to get out as it is reinforced concrete…The pressoir is inset very deep into the concrete plinth and is also proving difficult to remove…
What a dusty mess!
Next we have started excavating next to the cuve so that we have some working space to attack the beton arme from around it - interesting as it looks like there was another room down beneath the floor at some point with solid stone wall. This is all reinforcing our thoughts that the house was built deep but then infilled around with rubble after the cuves were put in place.
So the next job will be to continue excavating out the floor below and to find somewhere to get rid of all that rubble! Can't wait!