Monday was another day of paper work at home as the van was in the garage having a few niggles put right.  After picking the van up on Tuesday morning Dane and I spent the day doing a few runs in the van picking up scaffold boards and trestles and getting them to site so Richard could continue with his brick work which he did on the Wednesday.  Thursday he was away for the day so Dane set about running in the wall truss hangers while I dug out for the underground pipe work for the gutter down pipes.  Richard was back in on the Friday to finish the two gable ends and that completed all the brick and block work, so we could then make a start on the roof the following week, hopefully getting most of it done just before we take out first well earned break of the year, and are we looking forward to that!

It was quiet week for Dane and me.  On the Monday we put in the block and beam floor at Alconbury, so everything was ready for Richard the brickie to start putting up the brick and block walls on the Wednesday.  On Tuesday we went to finish off a few snagging points from a previous job, and on the Thursday we met with Richard from Choice web design to discuss revamping the web site and adding some new exciting content to the site.  This meant on the Wednesday and Friday I had the joy of doing my VAT return and going through my paper work ready to submit my end of year accounts.

On Monday we decided to shutter the footings as there was a strong chance of rain and we didn’t want the footing walls to collapse in on themselves.  We pulled the last length of the trench to finish things off, but things weren’t going to plan.  We kept digging down but we soon started to realise that the existing footings on the house were deeper on the left hand side than the right hand side.  We got to the stage where the digger was no more use as it couldn’t reach, so it was out with the shovel and a bit of hand digging.  We ended up a further 800mm down on the left trench than the right.  Obviously this had been done for a reason on the existing house, so we called out the Building inspector to check things over before we proceeded with the concrete fill.  The following day the inspector signed off the trench at the depth we had gone down too, and Dane and I set about running our levels in.
We got onto site around lunch time on Wednesday expecting the concrete pump lorry to turn up around 13.00, with the concrete lorry following on shortly afterwards.  The concrete pump lorry arrived on time and he set himself up ready for the concrete.  Unfortunately the concrete company weren’t on the same page as us.  The concrete delivery turned up at around 15.00, two hours late!  Dane got his quantity spot on (and didn’t he let me know it!) and we filled the trench to our level, tampered it down, job done.
On Thursday we filled up another skip with earth as we took the earth level down to give us the 150 void below the block and beam floor.  On Friday Richard the brickie tuned up to run in the trench blocks and a couple of courses of bricks ready for us to run in the block and beam floor the following week.  Everything was ticking along nicely.

Monday was another bank holiday, so on the Tuesday and the Wednesday Dane and I went about getting the new site set up.  This involved travelling about moving tools and materials, organizing the toilet hire, digger and dumper delivery, contacting Building Control, organizing material prices and deliveries and putting together a proposed work schedule for the coming weeks.
On Thursday we took delivery of the digger, dumper and toilet, plus two skips ready to get rid of the earth from the footings.  We then set out for the extension footings and once that was completed we made a start on pulling the footings.  Because we only had a path for access down the side of the property I had to get and use a micro digger for the first time.  Looking at the size of it I thought we might end up hand digging as the machine looked a bit under whelmed for the job in hand.  But I was soon put in my place as the little micro digger took no trouble in digging down to a metre and a half and had no problems in disposing of the earth into Danes tracked skip loader.  Don’t judge a book by its cover as they say.  We also called out the building inspector to check off the trial hole we had dug so we could continue the footings at the agreed level all the way round.
Friday was just more of the same as we continued to pull the footings and fill the skips.  By the end of Friday we were only left with a small length of trench to finish off on the Monday, so we had made good progress and things were going well.