Stephen is working hard in digging the Great Hole! It is a case of doing a few hours in between rain showers and sometimes heavy ones!! But also tackling man made problems like the battery going flat on us (The infamous Dumper Incident!).
Quick before the rain comes!
The Dumper Incident or is it a Friday 13th thing??!
The Great Hole is coming so watch this space!!
We started digging for gold today! The 4.2m wide (over 13 feet) by 18m long (59feet) hole is quite big with a spur (like a capital L) spur for another 5m (16 feet). Oh Yes it is as deep as we can go with the digger and this is about 2.5m (8feet) down! Down! down we go! Now that’s a lot of dirt or rather in this case sand!
We discovered that the sand is quite loose and keeps collapsing into the hole so we are being careful not to get too close with the digger!
The heaps will grow and grow so we might end up blocking the camera view! Certainly the house’s windows will be completely blocked! So we are thinking of extending the pole up some extra metres to peer over!
We had a flying visit from our Building Control inspector and we had a quick talk about the need to make sure the ground under and around the garage will be compacted very carefully to minimise settling effects. He was reassured that our garage slab is going to be 150mm thick and will have fibre reinforcement added. So we can now get on with the massive task of digging a large hole!
We started to dig the first trench for the earth tubes and as soon as it was full depth the walls started to collapse, a large chunk from the right and a smaller section on the left.
As we were planning to work at the bottom of these trenches this is a bit of problem… When we dug out the leach field the sides of the hole stayed put for a week and more!
I think we will have to think of another way to do the earth tubes…
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! 
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 deepest job so far and probably ever, is installing the Earth Tubes! We want these to be buried as deep as possible to take advantage of the cool and almost constant thermal storage of the “earth” at those depths!
Marking out all the trench lines by banging in 25 stakes around the outside to form a cat cradle pattern!!
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!
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…
Started moving the top soil to our spoil heap at the top of the garden. Just load and dump over and over again…
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.
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…
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!
And now watch it all in 2 minutes