Backfilling

This week we've been backfilling the house - getting the basement back surrounded by the earth.  Its a heavy job and I took a few days off work to get on the end of a shovel and get stuck in.  While we're using an excavator, it can't do everything nor can it be 100% exact for some of the detail - therefore the shovel is the only way to get it tidy.

The initial excavation was neat and there isn't a massive amount of fill to go against the wall.  The tricky thing is that we want a layer of drainage stone all the way up the wall, but as it's expensive we can't just use that - we need to build up with caly and stone.  In order to do this we need to build up slowly with a plywood board providing a seperation.  Some stone, then clay, then stone all piled in from 3 meters overhead.  But we get it done. and I get a free workout from it.  At the bottom of all this is a drainage pipe, and we manage to exhume the original drain at the side and feed the this drain into it.  All that took a full day with me, Tom and a digger, while the builder and blocklayer continued to bring up the walls inside. 

Today, we're bringing up the level for the ground floor to sit on, that's a full day to refill a large qty of earth with a digger and a 20-ton truck tipping it in.  Tommorow we can then backfill the last section of the retaining wall.

We also noticed a little 'detail' that we'll resolve.  Where the blocks of the internal wall meet the concrete retaining wall there is a cold bridge that will leak heat.  Where the block meets ICF it's insulated, but where its block on concrete it isn't.  So when backfilling we'll place a 60mm insulation layer in between the deck-drain board and the bituthene membrane to mitigate that.  It's more a mental thing to be honest, knowing its there is worse than the actual effect of it.