Dig Dig Dig...

Undoubtedly time for a build update as it's been a few months. At the moment we have a ditch... it may not sound terribly exciting, but it is the start of the underpinning for our neighbours buildings and will soon be full of lovely slurry concrete, which means digging our own foundations will be next. Adam has dug it all out by hand on his own, as I've been ill for the last few weeks, which has added a few challenges for the poor guy, what with us having four kids. He did receive a little help from them though, as they all pitched in over the last week finishing up the last bit, even the littlest with his workman gloves!

The first stage of the underpinning was to dig the trench on our land to enable us to dig sideways under the neighbours buildings. The reason for underpinning is to stabilise the buildings when we lay our foundations. As our extension will be built so close to theirs, the foundations of their buildings must be to the same depth to stop movement when we build. Neither neighbours garage or conservatory's foundations were deep enough (which is normal) hence the need to underpin. Underpinning is done in sections. For the neighbours conservatory, as it is 3m long, it will be dug in three keys and our other neighbours garage will be dug in nine keys, as it is longer. Please see the diagram below:

The dark grey sections are the original foundations. The numbered pale grey keys are where we will underpin and the mid grey sections are where the dry mortar underpinning layer will be packed in above the concrete underpinning once that has 'gone off'.

The red coloured keys 1, 4 and 7 will be dug out and underpinned first, followed by the blue keys 2, 5 and 8 and finally the green keys 3, 6 and 9. The keys are dug out and filled in this order to preserve the buildings stability.

Once this is all set our foundations can be dug and filled-definitely hiring a mini digger for that though!

We decided to have 5 raised beds in our gardens. One quarter circle brick built flower bed in the front garden to replace the lawn which will also extend the driveway. Two half circle brick flower beds and two rectangular oak sleeper vegetable beds will be in the back garden. I am about to start work on the two vegetable beds, which you can follow on the 'Handmade' or 'Our Home' pages. The reason we decided to do this now, is to save the good quality top soil, which will need disposing of when we dig the foundations and also to save money in the long term. By filling the beds with top soil from our garden, we will need less skip load fulls removed and will not have to buy in good quality top soil at a later date to fill the beds.

Other developments to our house include moving our distribution box to a different wall, and tearing the old wall down in the kitchen to open the space out. The wall supported the platform towards the top of the stairs, so supports were placed down from the joists above and additional joists were added as horizontal supports. The section was plaster boarded ready to be skimmed when the house extension is plastered- the house looks like a bit more like a building site everyday!

In terms of planning, we have had our structural drawings completed by our Structural Engineer, Mike and we have submitted our application for building regulations that Andy our Architect completed for us, so we wait to hear from them. We have also paid Cadent for the gas meter to be moved, as the pipe runs to the side of our house down length of our drive way where we are building. We had a visit from the Cadent Inspector who came to advise us on the procedure for laying the foundations. We are also speaking with Severn Trent, as we have sewage pipes underground where the rear extension will run, so all fun, fun, fun.

We had a meeting with our builder, Carl, a couple of weeks ago and we are still due to start building mid April. It's very exciting, to think about what will be and very worrying when you think about the money involved, but it will come around quick and we have a lot of work to do between now and then so, better get cracking...

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