Sliding door beam

I have not been updating, we've been doing many little and finishing things, and I didn't feel like writing about those. Today however, Pim and his dad started something rather big.
We've ordered the last batch of windows for the house, for the future kitchen/dining room. These take a few months of queue and manufacture, and we've now started actually making the holes where they'll go. On the very end of our house, we're putting a large sliding door that will cover most of the wall. This was the shed, and it will be the dining room. On the picture above, you see where the hole for a beam was started. The wall of the building to the right is the neighbour's (I think it's a horse stable). This is the area where we had the hillbilly tomato roof, which we have now removed.

Pim screwed some extra pieces of wood with very large screws to hold the top portion of the wall up while making a hole and installing the beam. It was all done today as quickly as possible, and the structure held very well (the roof is mostly supported on the back and front walls anyway).

Pim's dad working on the wall. 

Above you can still see the beam that we used. They're repurposed "vintage" railroad tracks. There were several of these in the back/shed, holding up a very strong flat ceiling in concrete that we removed some time ago. The space on top of it as you can see was very small, all in all a little puzzling, it was probably the strongest ceiling of the entire house. Maybe they stored gold bars in there, haha.

The leftover beam.

Pim cut off the necessary piece of beam that we had been keeping in place, and they placed it in the hole over two flat and level blocks of concrete they had placed over the bricks.

Beam in place over the concrete blocks.

Beam in place over the concrete blocks.

More cement.

Reinforced with chicken wire.

To fill the gap over the beam again, Pim placed some recycled chicken wire we found in the garden, then concrete. So in a way it is reinforced concrete. A piece of wood and some plastic closes the gap below.

Reinforced with chicken wire.

This is not the way these things are normally done, everything would just come off and the beam placed, but we didn't want to leave this entire part of the building open to the elements in January for who knows how long... once the date to place the windows approaches, we'll remove the rest of the wall.

The same still has to be done for a couple of windows, also. We have other pieces of railroad for that.