It continued to rain, sometimes steadily, sometimes heavily. The site was a total mess. We had to agree to pay vast sums of money for more soil to be taken off site as well as a load of crushed concrete delivered to make a track round the front and side of the house, to enable machinery to have some chance of moving round. We'd have had to have done this at some point even if it had been dry, but we needed far more due to the watery muddy conditions.
One muck away truck arrived one morning to take away a pile of soil, and returned two hours later seemingly for his second load which the groundworkers had got ready for him - only for the truck to reverse onto our drive and tip the original lot back on our land. The tips were no longer taking muck away - tips were closing, trucks were axle deep in mud. The truck driver had been to three tips with no luck. The groundworkers had never seen this before. Let's just say it didn't make for a happy day on site!
The surface water drainage work seemed to be comparatively easy. Pipes poking up where we're
expecting downpipes to be one day, a run round the back of the house, more brown pipe being buried in little trenches of shingle, but instead of being directed to the sewers, it all has to be "discharged on premises", which means soaking away on site. The rainwater drain runs therefore go to soakaways on site, of which we have two. One big long one along the side by the field, and one giant might one in the driveway to take the rainwater from the front of the house. We were told that the one at the front alone was the size of that for several houses. Why we had to have such enormous soakaways we will never know, but it seemed to be more over engineering to ensure no possible rain run off into the road under any circumstances, which included one in 100 year mass flash flood events from climate change prediction models as far as we could tell. Hillcroft won't be responsible for any water that falls on its roof ending up on the road. Ever.
Meanwhile, there was a lot of floor insulation to fit! This was in the form of 300mm thick sheets of EPS100 - dense polystyrene. It had been sitting in the garage area for a while (getting wet, and there was debate as to whether that mattered or not) and Ben set about laying it onto the floor, some in whole sheets, but also cutting it into shapes to fit round the soil vent pipes and corners. Andy helped out, and filled in any gaps of any size with expanding foam. I made the first of many trips to Screwfix to buy multiple cans of the stuff, each time someone at the counter would quip "that's a bloody big hole you're going to try to fill". No, just lots of little ones. "What on earth are you doing?"... Building a house.... cue lots more questions.
With us both now taking time off here and there, and weekends and Christmas coming up, we had to just get on with it ourselves. Thankfully we had a bit of time to sort the ducting runs to ensure they were done as Andy wanted. We have more ducts coming in to the utility room than is sensible. Electric supply, electric outlet to garage, data feed back to electric supply, data feed out to garage, incoming water (a special insulated one with inner ducting), incoming cable lest we ever get comms via cable - maybe one day cable will come to Twyford? if it does we're ready!
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