Return to the plot

Well, it’s almost 2 years since the last report here on action at our building plot. Perhaps this story is going to be like one of those sad accounts on Houses under the Hammer where the TV cameras return after many years to discover that the developer has been thwarted and nothing has changed?

2019 disappeared on us as various potential buyers of our current property came and went without any real movement. We were very close to selling as 2019 turned into 2020, but as accounts of a mystery virus began to emerge from China, the mortgage market tightened and our sale did not materialise. At about this time our architect advised us to begin the process of applying for permission to connect our plot to the public sewer, which, apparently helpfully, is mapped as passing only 2 metres from our plot, in the adjacent field. To say that this process has been tortuous would be an understatement. With substantial payments being demanded at each stage, we have gone through applying for section 104 approval to be allowed to make a section 106 application, negotiating with the Land Registry, the farmer and DCWW’s solicitor to secure the easement necessary to dig in the field, before securing a contractor with the capacity to do the job. The neighbouring farmer was really helpful and put no obstacles in our way, also giving us permission to fell a tree on his land which was shading our plot. Now that we are 7 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, conditions for this kind of work have changed substantially.

However, we are now close to selling our house to a family moving from the Home Counties, attracted as we were to the beauty of the Clwydian Range and a style of life dominated by nature and small country towns nearby.

So last Friday I returned to the plot to spend the day with Dan and his team, and to share the excitement of breaking through our fence and digging for the sewer pipe in the field. Dwr Cymru Welsh Water’s mapping does not include depth information, so during the application process I had had to seek out an inspection chamber upstream, measure its depth, and calculate the likely depth to which we would have to dig by using distance and gradient data.

The excavator proceeded gently to the estimated depth, 1800mm, at which point, as if by magic, we had the first sight of a patch of concrete covering the pipe.

This was great news. Before the service pipe was breached, a channel was dug back into the plot where the link pipe and inspection chambers were to be installed.

The new pipes were laid out to check how everything would sit, and then the cutting and jointing happened, apparently just as someone upstream was emptying their bath. It could have been much worse.

 

DCWW engineers in the office had insisted on a specific design and materials for our connection, involving two inspection chambers (only one of which, the nearer to the public sewer) they will ‘adopt’) but their inspector on the ground, who has the final say and who is fortunately well known to our contractor, had different ideas. This made a nonsense of the 5 re-design stages the office had put our architect through. The second chamber, not adopted by DCWW but subject to building regulations, incorporates a backdrop to accommodate the higher piping which will be installed to connect to the house when built.

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We had a very brief visit from the DCWW inspector in the afternoon to approve the piping and the way it was laid in pea gravel, and then the back-filling was completed. Job done. 

Now we are waiting for our builder to start on the foundations, for our sale to progress, and for further developments in the management of COVID. At 6pm on the day of this work Wales went into a fortnight’s ‘firebreak’ lockdown.