The plan for the week was to complete the foundations and get them signed off by the Building Inspector, so we could make a start on getting the walls up.  Unfortunately Stu was off sick for the first three days, but this could have been a clever move on his behalf to avoid the heavy lifting involved with laying the block and beam floor! (Only joking Stu).  First of all Wayne and I had to excavate the remaining soil prior to the block and beam floor going in.  Nice and easy enough, until with the very last scoop with the digger, Wayne caught the mains electric cable going to the plot and snapped it in half.  Whoops! So I called out EDF straight away, who promptly arrived 7 hours later to connect things back up.  It was a bit of an inconvenience for the day, but the main thing was everyone was safe and sound.

Over the next couple of days Wayne and I huffed and puffed preparing for, and putting into place the block and beam floor, with things progressing nicely.  The Building Inspector carried out a site inspection on Wednesday afternoon, signing off the drainage pipe work and the newly laid floor.  Stu was back into work on the Thursday, with Wayne taking a day off, so Stu and I loaded out the bricks and blocks and prepared the site ready for Wayne’s return on Friday.  Friday was a good day, with good weather, and we started getting the walls up, with Wayne laying the brick wall, while I laid the internal block wall.  Stu was busy mixing up the muck and dealing with more material deliveries onto site.  We all worked hard and things progressed well, with the first wall getting up to the first lift height ready for the scaffold.

So after four weeks, we have cleared the site, got the footings and drainage in, got the floor laid and now the foundations are complete and all signed off.  We have had a few ups and downs along the way, but we have acted quickly to overcome these issues, and things are progressing nicely.  But now we have started on the brick and block shell, weather depending, we should really start to see things progress quickly.

After digging out the extra 500mm depth in the footings, we called in the Building Inspector to check over our work, and sign it off prior to concreting, which he duly did.  I placed our concrete delivery for 9am Wednesday morning, and we took a day off on the Tuesday as there was nothing more we could do until the concrete arrived.  We arrived on site at 8am ready for our concrete at 9am, and what did we find?  The 7 metre run of footings had caved in due to the heavy rain on the Tuesday.  It was a mess.  Dave at the concrete factory was kind enough to put the concrete back until 10am.  So we had two hours to clear the footings!  Wayne jumped on the digger (no change there then!) and started to get out what earth he could, while Stu and I put on our fashion wellies and had the joy of doing even more hand digging.  After a frantic 90 minutes of digging, we had the footings back to their former glory and ready for the concrete which arrived just before 10am.  Big lorry and little drive don’t go to well, and it was very tight for space, but we just about got the lorry into position to deposit its load.  Once we had tampered the concrete down to our required level we were all done.  All this by 11.30 in the morning!

On Thursday Wayne and Stu were filling up skips with the over site earth so we could get the earth down to level ready for the block and beam floor which was arriving Friday, only one week after making the call to David at EH Smith.  On the Friday we started to lay the trench blocks, and Wayne started on bringing the brick and block cavity wall up to damp level, and we actually had a nice sunny day for a change!  So fingers crossed for some good weather the following week, we are hoping to have the foundations completed and all signed off.  Thats the plan anyway!

Everything went well this week.  We got the two new man holes in and all the pipe work connected back up.  Wayne joined Stu and me on the Thursday and we made a start on digging out the footings.  We were filling up the skips quicker than we could get them exchanged, which slowed us up a little bit.  We had the footings dug out and ready for inspection by the Building Inspector on the Friday afternoon.  The concrete was provisionally booked for Monday, I liaised with David from EH Smith the builders merchants to have our first delivery of materials on the Tuesday.  All we needed was the thumbs up from the Building Inspector, but we got a thumbs down instead.  Unfortunately due to the conifers and bushes that had been in the garden prior to their clearance, there were a few roots on show in the footings.  The Inspector advised us to dig down another 500mm below the lowest roots, remove the conifers and their stumps that ran near to the footings to the rear of the extension.  We would also have to change from a concrete slab foundation to a block and beam construction.

All this was over and above the original architect’s specification.  So I advised the clients as to why the extra work was required, and I then put in writing the additional costs before proceeding with the work.  The concrete order was put on hold, and David immediately altered our materials delivery.  He also got straight onto the phone to his block and beam supplier to forward our specification and get a price and arrange a delivery time and date.  So within an hour of the Building Inspectors decision, the specification was revised and a new work schedule was put into place, and new delivery dates were scheduled for the following week for our new materials.  All that Stu and I had to do was dig out by hand, another 500mm of earth for the footings as we could no longer get the digger into position.  Oh joy!

Stu and I proceeded with the site clearance for the extension at Ramsey last week, which involved clearing lots of prickly bushes, and lots of ivy which wraps itself around anything and everything and had to be cleared with the assistance of a chainsaw.  We then got in a petrol shredder to make a very large pile of garden waste into a very small pile of garden waste, including the addition of Stu’s garden pliers which he accidently dropped into the shredder, which proceeded to turn them into 100 bits of garden pliers!

Next on the schedule was to relocate the two existing man holes so they would not be in the way of the new footings.  This involved digging up the area around the chambers and exposing the existing underground soil pipes.  We exposed the first chamber, and there I was gently chipping away some concrete so we could give ourselves some working space with an SDS breaker when all of a sudden I found the mains water pipe and instantly had a 15ft water fountain shooting into the air!  I rushed to the front of the house to locate the mains stop cock to turn off the supply so we could carry out repairs.  But one small problem, no stop cock.  The previous house owner had the drive concreted over and duly concreted over the stop cock, so we had no way of turning the supply off!  I called out the water company, who arrived about 90 minutes later, and it took the engineer a further 45 minutes to locate and find another stop cock to terminate the supply.  As it was late, we made a temporary fix, and then carried out a full repair the following day.  One week in, and we have lost a day already, but hopefully we can make that back next week.