We were back on site on Monday morning with a full day’s hand digging in the trenches to look forward to.  Last week the Building Inspector wasn’t happy with the depth of the footings so we had to go down another metre.  We made a start the previous Thursday, but the weather was against us on the Friday.  The weather was good, blue skies and sunshine. By mid afternoon we had broken the back of the digging, and we had found the bottom of the existing footings and started to level the trench out.  Tuesday morning we called out the Building Inspector once again to take another look at the footings.  While we waited we tidied up the trench and made it look presentable.  Late morning the Inspector duly arrived and passed off the footings straight away.  Two days of labour intensive digging all for a sixty second site visit and a yes!
 

I had provisionally booked in the concrete delivery for Wednesday earlier in the week, so we were all systems go to fill the trench with concrete.  Stu was on mechanical dumper duty, having the concrete poured into his bucket and then driving to the rear of the property and tipping the concrete into the trench.  I was on rake duty, very technical.  I had to try and push the concrete around the trench to keep it level and even as it filled up.  Which doesn’t sound too difficult, but bearing in mind it was nice and sunny, I still had my thermals on and we had 12 meters of concrete delivered, which meant the sweat was pouring off me and my arms felt like Popeye’s, even if they didn’t look like them!  As we got near the end of the load, Stu was on and off his dumper helping me out.  After about three hours of filling we had the trench filled and all levelled off, job done.
 

Thursday was about clearing the site of all the excess earth we had.  Stu was back on his dumper and I was on the digger and by the end of the day we had filled two large 8 yard skips with about 14 tonnes of earth.  That was that stage completed, next stage is the block and beam floor.