Jonathan: When we bought this house back in late 2002 we knew there were cracks in the north east corner of the house, but in the surveyor’s report it said they were old settlement cracks, weren’t active, and had been repaired. Over the past nine years we’ve seen for ourselves that whilst the first is almost certainly true, the last was dubious but if one thing was certain it was that it was definitely active.  Doubts about this – and certainly knowledge that the surface water drainage wasn’t up to the job – has got in the way of building proper paths around the house: we’d have to undo that work to fix any problem with the foundations.  Back in mid August (six weeks ago – but if feels like six months) I took the bull by the horns and started investigative digging to check the foundations.  What I found appalled me!  The foundation strips are of poor quality concrete, barely as wide as the twin-leaf block cavity wall, and tapering inwards with depth. But in the north east corner I found that under the outer leaf of the wall the concrete was barely more than an inch thick (and this cracked and falling away) – and below that there was concrete only under the inner leaf and perhaps the cavity. The only thing holding up the outer leaf would be the steel cavity ties! More digging soon revealed that there were other areas nearly as bad. Up till now, if I stood perfectly still, stopped breathing and tried to put my heart on pause for a second or two, and it was a perfectly still day with not a breath of wind, I’ve no doubt I would have heard the faint but insistent ringing of distant alarm bells: but now the bells were mounted up on the rooftop and drowning out any other thought!  Enquires by email and phone resulted in quotes amounting to tens of thousands …. So I’m now in the midst of a DIY programme of underpinning that will drag on for months. Section by section, I’m bracing the external walls so that the weight of the good (or already repaired) bits of wall hold up (as a cantilever) the bit I’m digging under; and then in goes reinforcement bars and concrete, install new surface water drainage, and then build up the path by the house. Here’s some photos from the infamous north-east corner, showing the temporary bracing partly removed, concreting finished,  the path made up ready for flags along the east gable, and the surface water drainage pipes laid out ready and then trenching in progress. Exciting stuff, eh? I did have a lot more pictures like this – including some of me lying down under the wall of the house in my boiler suit and smeared all over in mud, but they were lost in the transfer data from old computers to new a few weeks ago. However if you’re interested I could always take some new photos …. no I didn’t think so, and anyway the camera would get smeared with mud ;~)