Holemageddon

Monday 2nd September - the first full week of work for the guys on site, after us having a busy weekend at home trying to finalise various initial-groundworks-related things and writing many emails. Julian was back having a poke about and getting a feel for the site, and putting some little orange cups on top of the marker pins I'd kept tripping over.




Tuesday - I got a call from Julian to pop down to site as our building inspector Angela had arrived to inspect the first trial hole. I've spoken on the phone with Angela for months, and she's been a fount of knowledge and advice during some of the most stressful times earlier in the year when we were "between architects" with no idea what we were doing. Was lovely to finally meet her. And even better, she was very happy with Julian's first hole, which demonstrated that yes we're most certainly on chalk, meaning there was no need to dig foundations any deeper than the minimum. Phew.


This inaugral hole is the position of a dwarf wall under a bit of floor between what will be the lounge and dining area. Julian apologised for having such a tatty ruler for this photo.




Wednesday the digging started in earnest, with Matthew, Nick and Kyle digging the foundation walls and carting the spoil around, making a mini mountain range across the front of the site.

There were some bits that were harder than others :-)

A chap called Doug came along to survey the existing drain run, with the groundworks guys digging away for him and finding a hidden manhole down close to the road. Good news - everything from there on to the mains drains is fine. Bad news - the  drain further up which we'd looked at tying into was no good, but whatever - needed to dig it all up anyway. Apparently this Doug chap had all the latest kit, did a great survey and was a top bloke to boot, even providing us with a little report less than an hour later.

Thursday I popped in to site first thing to find much excavatory activity. In the afternoon we had another building inspector visit - this time Brian from the firm we're using for our structural warranty. Can't use Angela for that sadly. Long tedious story. Anyway Brian was also delighted with the holes, explained his delight in being based on the general rock-hardness of the ground and the total lack of tree roots, and informed me that he - or one of his colleagues (who knows) - wouldn't need to come back for another couple of weeks. Phew.

Friday was concrete delivery day though sadly neither of us were around to witness the Great Pour in the afternoon. Suddenly we have islands of chalk in streams of concrete. The walls of the house are going to be 30cm thick meaning our foundations are 60cm wide (size of digger bucket - next bucket size down would make things tricky), so the concrete streams are pretty wide. But they're not very deep.

Next week the guys will be building blockwork walls on the foundations in preparation for the beam and block floor.  Lots to decide now - we've spent Saturday making decisions about exact positions of soil pipes and where the drains will run. We have a plan! 

I am looking forward to the day when I spend the weekend thinking about kitchen cupboard doors and light fittings rather than drain runs :-)