Building a new house

Dan and his assistants have achieved an amazing amount this week, in spite of some unhelpful spells of rain. The excavation work started on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday, with all of the trenching except that for the garage completed. This included digging to below the level of the old septic tank chamber which was at the house end of the garage, and which necessitated a very wide and deep trench across what will be the front of the house. On Thursday morning we received this photo from our rather surprised neighbour-to-be, as a concrete pump big enough to build a skyscraper arrived at 8 o'clock. Over the course of the day, 10 deliveries of concrete went through the pump and into the trenches. Given the tightness of access to the site, the narrow roads through the village and the fact that the deliveries were stacking in order to ensure continuity of supply for the pump, it's amazing that the crew seems to have kept of all our neighbours onside.  We popped by just after lu...

I popped over to the site at lunchtime as Dan had said that he would start the trenching today. He had a midi digger and 9 ton dumper truck there and had got on well with marking out and digging the trenches for the back of the house. We understand that he and Pat don’t regard the septic tank chamber as a particular problem: their solution is to ensure that the concrete of the garage foundations goes deeper than it, then fill it in. We had a detailed response from Adrian to the discovery, which as he suggested I sent on to the structural engineer yesterday morning. I haven’t heard back but wonder if he and Pat have spoken. This evening we went over to see if the time lapse camera put in place yesterday had worked. It takes an image every 15 minutes during daylight from the back corner fence post and has indeed done the trick. We think Dan’s assistant is standing between the dining area and the sitting room. 

November is not normally regarded as the best time of the year to begin groundworks, but our development has been waiting most of this year for the consent for our sewer connection, which had to be in place before our foundations could be built. So 10 November 2020 was the date for the site preparation (removing rubbish and scraping off the topsoil) to begin. Gwyn, who was the JCB driver for the sewer job, returned and neatly scraped and scraped away. The topsoil was gathered at one side and back of the site. Gwyn even kindly replanted in the corner of the site a now leafless acer which we had all admired in its autumn finery three weeks earlier. We visited in the late afternoon. For the first time, the plot no longer looked like the former garden it had been, pond and all. The second day's work involved more grading and the lorrying away of spoil. Fortunately the ground held up (just) to the weight of the lorry.  There's still moisture in the ground after significant rain a co...