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.