Underpinning Begins

Today, the hole was dug down to, in the most part it's full final depth. The digger was then used to cut underneath the foundations of the end wall in two places, as shown in this picture :

The idea is that pillars will be built in these two gaps, allowed to go off to the point where they can support the wall, and then the other ground dug away and similarly filled.

You can see from the photo that bedrock was hit about 5ft down - see on the left where the colour changes from brown clay brash to white rock. This was quite hard to dig out apparently. It is good for the future stability of the building though ! The other advantage is the large number of stones that we can rescue for wall building. I think we will be working hard this weekend !

On the edge of the current dig (where I was standing to take the picture), the contractor believes we are just touching on the edge of the filled in quarry that makes up the northern part of our garden. There was quite a bit of tarmac buried here, which coincides with what the previous owners told us. This other pit was filled in by the gas board, with material from the nearby estate built in the 70's/early 80's.

As required, we had notified the Building Control department about the pending start of this project, but had not heard from them. Our contractor was quite worried about this and made a couple of 'phone calls to chase them. Initially he was told that they had no record of our project, but once Jan furnished them with a reference number we were away. The inspector was on-site this afternoon and approved the go ahead. Various other aspects of the build were discussed and agreed, including a slightly different wall construction, and an altered land-drain. Both these changes should make things easier.

A final picture for today shows the state of the pit now that the spoil has been dumped in it :

We had hoped that it would all end up at the bottom but, as you can see, it is a near vertical wall of earth and stones. There is a huge amount of it - the photo doesn't really show how big a scree slope this is ! I will discuss with the contractor whether he can do anything to help shift it to the bottom for levelling. I don't fancy doing it with a spade ! In fact he has asked us if we want the whole thing filled in. I think the idea is that he brings other peoples spoil in and dumps it here rather than in landfill. As long as it's not asbestos, I guess that would be OK ! We haven't really decided what to do with this part of the garden yet, so haven't committed to anything.