Category: Garage

The Garage

  • Service trench completed

    Service trench completed

    Thursday 30th

    Installed all the pipes and conduits into the trench after sliding 2 x 22mm plastic plumbing pipe with foam insulation (25mm on flow and 19mm on return) into the large conduit (tried insulating with rockwool and gave it up as a bad job!).

    Service Trench All conduits in place

    They are from left to right :- Data, rainwater1, compressed air, rainwater2, mains water, central vac, spare, solar water & electricity.

    Friday 1st Oct

    Started by filling trench to approx 300mm above conduits then placed warning tapes (100mm wide polythene printed with warning messages about water & electricity below) along the trench. We then filled the trench to the top.

    Service Trench Filled

  • Service connections

    We need to connect the new house to the services (Electricity, Water & Phone). Currently these all come to the old house and will need to be diverted. The phone is overhead and will need to be routed underground as the overhead path intersects the new house so is not practical.

    We will take all of them to the garage to use while living there, and the power and phone will be connected back to the main house later. A T junction in the water main will supply water for the house.

    A trench will be cut just inside the boundary with Smiths Loke from the current pedestrian entrance (water meter), past the telegraph pole (opposite side loke via a side trench), then pick up the power and run down the plot to before the corner of the new house then turn crossing the corner of the utility room and then to the garage.

    All the connections will be in conduits except cold water which is just laid in the trench.

    We will install these connections between the garage and the house.

    Connection Pipe / Cables Conduit Notes
    1. Mains electricity 25mm2 cables 50mm Placed opposite side of trench from data cables
    2. Rain water pumped from tank under garage 32mm Polythene pipe Submerged pump in bottom of tank rated up to 7000litres per hour and 8m of head
    3. Rain water back from header tank in house 32mm polythene pipe Header tank will automatically be topped up with mains water if lack of rain
    4. Insulated pipes (two) for solar heat transfer 22mm PEX Barrier pipes Inside the 150mm pipes rolled in ordinary glass fibre wool insulation (just enough for minimal heat loss during the 5 minutes transfer
    5. Compressed Air 22mm PEX Barrier pipe inside the 150mm 8bar (maximum) Compresser in Garage
    6. Low voltage cables CAT 5e cables 50mm Network, Telephone and other signal lines
    7. Central Vacuum System 50mm Cleaning Tasks in the Garage and Garden Room
    8. Nothing 50mm Future Expansion
  • Garage sewage pipe trench ready

    Marked out the position of the garage on the mass wall. The thick black vertical lines are the outside measured positions of the walls and thinner lines defines the foundations. This gives us the position of the sewage connection for the garage so we could markout and dig the trench to place the sewage pipe.
    shows the gravel in the trench

    We await for our building inspector to approve it.

  • Garage Site Clearance Review

    The footprint of the garage and driveway has been cleared. The top soil was removed (about 300mm, a foot) and dumped on the heap which we are now calling Mount Sod! A big heap of earth

    Yes it is getting big! We found a old buried rubbish pile containing bones (small ones! Animal ones probably pig), very rusty tin cans, broken glass whatevers and other odds and ends!

    We had nice weather (tongue in cheek) on Monday with hail, thunder and lightning! The rain fall was over 11mm in just 20minutes! The lake formed with water off the roof of our shed and water coming down the Loke. We are calling it Lake Puddle! The lake of water after the thunderstorm on August 1st

  • Garage site clearance Day 4 & 5

    Day 4 – Thursday 5th August

    Started the day by doing a repair on the digger which I had been meaning to do for ages. The switch which allows the boom to be swiveled side to side relative to the cab hasn’t worked for ages. Fixed it but it took hours… Then back to the soil moving.

    Oops! I bent the wheelbarrow which was leaning against the bank (the boundary between us and school) and backed the dumper truck into it!

    Day 5 – Friday 6th August

    Last bit of soil removal and a bit of a tidy up. Then we could start marking out where the earth tube tenches will go. 25 stakes later a cats cradle was born…

  • Garage site clearance Day 2 & 3

    Started moving the top soil to our spoil heap at the top of the garden. Just load and dump over and over again…

    Day 2 – Tuesday 3rd August

    Day 3 – Wednesday 4th August

  • Garage site clearance Day 1

    The next job is to clear the area for the garage, earth tubes, rainwater tanks and soak away. We need to remove the top soil over the area from the fence to the loke.

    Day 1 – Monday 2nd August

    Remove  paving slabs from in front of the old shed doors. Then at 12:30 Rain stopped play (oops I mean Work!), a nice summer thunderstorm of rain and hail which droped 11mm of rain in 15 minutes! Then the rain set in for the rest of the day…

  • Mass Wall Review

    Yippee the mass wall is now finished ..

    I think this the the hardest thing we have done so far (a foretaste of things to come).

    Here are some statistics – 11m long, 300mm wide and 775mm high (2.6 cubic meters).  This required us to dig nearly 4 cubic meters of soil out (50 wheel barrow loads). The concrete was made with 35 bags of cement (nearly a ton) and over 200 buckets of sand and stones and it weighs over 6 tons!

    A picture of the whole mass wall

    And now watch it all in 2 minutes

  • Mass Wall Foundation Day 5 & 6 (final days!!)

    The weather is much nicer for our last two days of working and building our Mass Wall Foundation!

    Day 5 – Thursday 29th July

    The next two segments between the posts were done today. We didn’t start until the afternoon and getting the formwork in place, took a bit of fiddling. We created a collection of wooden wedges to help jam in the formwork against the heavy weight of the concrete (we discovered that the top edge especially was suffering) and the wedges did help even though we had to put in a flat board behind the wedges as well to stop them digging into the soil! So we didn’t finished the concrete production until 7:30pm!

    Day 6 – Friday 30th July

    The final day is here! At last! well only for our mass wall! We extended the formwork by joining together the other two straight pieces. It is now 3.6metres long (12feet) as the last segment we decided to do in one go! We reinforced the top edge to stop it from bulging out with the weight (over one and a half tons) of concrete! The wedges are working very nicely indeed now especially if we use a flat board to spread the load on the soft soil.

    Well That’s That! PHEW!

  • Mass Wall Foundation – Day 3 & 4

    We continue with the Mass Wall foundation strip along the fence (Tern Gardens). The weather has been rather wet later in the afternoons!

    Day 3 – Tuesday 27th July

    We managed to slide off our mould or technically speaking “formworks”. It took a little lever to get them started but it was fairly easy after all! Dug holes for the next three posts and filled them up with our concrete. Was just finishing when the heavens opened with a downpour (we had over 6mm in just 10minutes!).

    Day 4 – Wednesday 28th July

    Built new pieces of formwork (flat pieces) to join two concrete piles together. We done two for now and got our concrete production line going again!! The weather got us a bit earlier today!

    Phew! What’s tomorrow going to be like!?