Monday, April 12, 2010

Initial groundworks just complete

So - only 2 weeks late and still not sure how much over budget, the ground works are nearly coming to a close. With moving the house area about a little, filling in the soft ground at the front, and removing a large volume of extra clay the area now just needs to be squared off on the walls of the lower area, and graded flat.  Then its time for the builder.



Thursday saw a lot of 4" stone go in, again Tom had it all arranged including vetting the quality of the stone.  They were giving us stone that had been laying about for a while, and it starts to deteriorate, get brittle and start to break up.  With the threat of going to a different quarry they then gave us fresh stone in the next loads and it will make a difference when it comes to the stability of the base. Our engineer was up on Saturday morning and we marked out the house on the dug area, it was exciting to be able to stand in where the rooms will be and visualize it, its getting tangible!

For most of Saturday we were getting rid of excess soil that had been dug up, but would have left no room at the front of the house, you can see in the picture above the ridge of earth to the right hand side.  It gave me an appreciation of the scale as we had 2 9-ton dumpers (Tom driving the wheels off one of them) and 2 20-ton trailers hitched to tractors running non-stop for most of the day.  The two trailers were a god-send as luckily another neighbour was looking for filling to make into a yard area below.  He had the trailers, and we had the filling so we saved the rental cost of these and the drivers, he saved the cost of the filling.  It makes for a lot more room on site.

So - next contractor in is the builder.  We have an added cost over expected straight away, as rather than just a raft foundation we need to build in 3 pads of concrete connected with a ground-beam of concrete at the front of the raft - about 3/4 the distance out in the picture above, under the left wheels of the tractor above (as looking from this angle).  More slippage.  But naturally its better to have it stable and lasting rather than fall apart in a few years.

Final part of Saturday was cleaning the road after the vehicles were plying up and down all day.  A lot of loose stone and mud were left and likely to chip a windscreen of a car.  So 2 1/2 hrs of road sweeping followed, I might not be useful when it comes to construction but years of cleaning in a fast-food restaurant stood to me then.

Next week has a good forecast for weather, hopefully this allows us to get a move on with the house itself.  My one and only concern now is to get weather-tight before the end of September otherwise we could be left with a few months of nothing over winter.  With the building sealed we can continue the fit out inside and keep making progress.

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