So having cleared the site, it was time to dig the footings, and here was my next cock-up.
My poured foundations will finish 550mm below the finished floor level, add to the this the 1metre footing and had a did depth of 1550mm, time to get started. So I dug a 300mm wide trench alongside the boundary with my neighbour.
- 1550
- (184.01 KiB)
I had expected this trench to be the hardest as I expected to come across his concrete footings which I thought might make excavating difficult but no, the neighbours house is built straight onto clay with only a single course of bricks to form a foundation.
Anyway, this looked like a mighty big trench for a single storey extension, so I went back to read Mikes build thread, there were the three words I had failed to read previously, "below ground level", my footings should only be 1metre below the existing ground level. Oh well, I'll have to explain that cockup to the building inspector.
Next I wanted to move onto the trench for the back wall, but the more I looked at it, I couldn't see a way to manoeuvre the digger to give me access to dig the whole trench without having to dig a fairly large section by hand. I rang my digger friend that evening and he offered to pop round the next day to give me some advise. Mulling it over at night stopped me from getting much sleep, I had one solution, but I didn't like it.
Next day, Dick, my digger friend popped round and could see the predicament and eventually decided the only way forward was the same idea I had the night before. I'd need to fill the well in again so I could sit the digger over the top to enable me to dig a complete trench
so I preceded to fill the well a second time, knowing full well that I would have the empty it (at least partially) again to enable me to get my shuttering in, this well was beginning to get to me.
Anyway, at the end of the day, the plan had worked and I had got a nice trench dug (at the right depth
) with slots cut out of the well walls.
- back wall
- (241.76 KiB)
The trench is straight, the photo seems to make them look offset.
Maybe I had finally conquered the well
So this brings us to today, all I had to do was dig the final trench, access was no problem so should be done in a jiffy right? Wrong. Digging away for the house just under the surface I start pulling up bricks. I stopped to investigate and I've taken the side out of another "well" that I had no idea about. This was no fresh water well, it's full of the most horrendous black smelly sludge I've ever come across. The well was not built with mortar, it's simply a circle of bricks dry fitted together topped of with a slab of stone. I suspect it's a old cesspit/soakaway, a really nice thought as I was getting covered in the black sludge. I've gone down over a metre in the hope of finding solid ground but to no avail, there is one area which offers no resistance to a spade, it's just sinks into the runny sludge.
- (490.7 KiB)
- (487.31 KiB)
It's official - I hate wells.
I'll ring the building inspector in the morning, get him out to inspect and see what he wants me to do to overcome it.