Safe As Houses

Solidly digging for a whole two months, you will please forgive the lack of any build updates. The good news is we are now out of the ground and rather than hearing about all the ground work over the months it took, you'll be all caught up over the next week.

Let's hit the ground running where we left the underpinning. It had been cold and wet when we started digging the underpinning and it did not improve into March, but we endured! I can now say with certainty, that spending my days in a muddy trench, crouched down digging sideways into compacted, damp soil is not fun! We were horribly achy, cold and tired. When the build is over and it looks fantastic, it will be well worth it though, so I held on to that dream with both hands and I dug! And dug! And dug! And when the underpinning was done... there was plenty more digging to be done.

I explained I my post 'Dig Dig Dig' the process we were following and follow it we did. Here are some fascinating pictures of the process...

Here is our little man very excitedly sitting in the concrete lorry...

...getting him out of it out of it was also fun!

Each key dug out has 3 reinforcing rods linking it to the neighbouring key, so they are all tied together. We have used foundation grade concrete for the underpinning, filled to the depth our foundations will be, to prevent movement and damage to the neighbours buildings. We followed the same process as above with the remaining two pours, each pour having four keys, three for the neighbours garage and one for the conservatory.

The next step was to back fill the trench, or so we thought. It seemed too wide to be used for foundations, but in hindsight, learning from our now overwhelming experience of dealing with absolutely every obstacle life could chuck at us, we could have just shuttered it off! Also, the building inspector wanted to see the site prior to our own foundation trenches being dug, so we felt we had no choice. We ended up shuttering the re dug trench anyway after we'd dug it out a second time. The rain had caused the sides to collapse in several places and it needed to be shuttered where the drains were passing through. Unfortunately, due to the shear quantity of groundwork, drainage, sewerage, water in, gas and electric needing to be navigated in the ground our trenches were left unfilled for quite awhile, which increases the risk of the trench walls collapsing. Avoid leaving your trench unfilled if you can, get the concrete in as quickly as possible- we did do that, but for us quickly was not two days later.

We removed the remaining excess soil, from our 'work site' on Tuesday that same week.

On Wednesday and Thursday we hired a breaker to break up the concrete driveway and paths, old garage floor plate, and patio and a digger to tear it up from the ground. We got all the rubble and soil removed on the Friday morning by a grabber lorry, then site was clear.

We hired the digger a further week to dig the foundations and also a dumper to move the soil around to the front of the house to be collected, as using barrows wasn't very efficient.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to do all the foundations and drains with a digger, so check out tomorrow's post for the next stage of the build.

If this isn't your cup of tea, and you prefer the Recipes, Easy Living and Handmade posts, don't worry I'll be getting back into my other content next week along with further build updates.

Happy to be back with you all and looking forward to what is to come.

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