Rain stops play

After the Easter break is over, the weather has rolled in.  A pity - over the Easter weekend we had decent weather that we could have finished the truck access road and started to pull back the excavation by another 2 meters - but the quarry supplying the stone was closed and we'll need to get the stone on top of the exposed hard-clay as soon as it's cleared to prevent it from mucking up from the excavator tracks.  So it's an effective 3 day delay between religious holidays and the weather.  Forecast for the next few days is to clear so we're on track to be ready for the foundation by week end.  Funnily that's also when the operator wants to get finished, so I'd expect a push this week to do so.  Suits me.

Its unknown how much all this will cost extra.  On top of that, we have a huge amount of earth dug out that has to go somewhere, and it's cluttering up the site.  I really want to ignore it at the moment to get a start on the house, but it won't go away on its own.  The downside is that with the wet weather and mucky site we can't remove it from our field as it will track a lot of that mud on the road, and that has to be cleaned off after.  Easier to wait for a dry spell (as well as the hard road onto the site) and clear it off at a later date.  We're lucky in the fact that we have an area to dump it; otherwise we'd be paying for someone to take it off our hands, so the cost of it will be in the hire of the equipment to load it into a vehicle and dump it across the road.

Regarding the extra 2 meters, due to the springs discovered, and the fact the harder shale falls deeper towards the front of the house, we are pulling back the location of the house by 2 meters to reduce the amount of filling that has to go into that area.  It's much cheaper to dig out than fill in so pulling it back is a better option.  We'll have to step back the sides of the excavation more to prevent the house being lost into the side of the hill.