Piling Starts

It all came together yesterday morning. The groundworks contractor turned up to do the setting out. I asked him to do the simple single-row pile lines first, as these do not need to take into account a retaining wall. This means that the centre line of the piles is equivalent to the centre line of the house walls. Easy.

While he was doing this I managed to get hold of the structural engineer (at 08:15 !), and obtain the crucial dimension that I was missing, concerning the double row of piles. I then knew the location of the centre line of this row too, so passed this on.

The piling crew arrived early and started to set up. They were waiting on a "rough terrain" fork lift, not due until 11:00, but there seemed to be plenty of preliminaries to keep them occupied.

The only slight hiccup came later in the day, when the fork lift slid off the gravelly track - over-enthusiastic driving I think :

I had to ask the groundworks contractor to pop back and help dig them out. A healthy dumping of stone under each wheel (unfortunately taken from my pile that I was hoping to save), and a bit of a push from behind eventually did the trick. The fork lift is 4WD, but does not have a diff lock, so was pretty useless once one wheel started spinning. A caterpillar tracked machine would have been better, and something not quite so wide ! Apparently it is hired locally, so they don't get much say in what they get.

By the end of the day one pile was in place, 4m long, with an additional half metre rock-socket.

During the morning the structural engineer brought up a copy of the latest plans, and checked the pilers were happy. The plans turned out to be "preliminaries" because of a mistake, recently discovered, concerning, you've guessed it, the positioning of the walls on the beams. A new set are being prepared.