We have finally finished sieving the soil, moved the “clean” dirt (huh!) to Mount Sod, and filled 5 large (6cubic yard) skips of rubbish!!
Blog
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The Massive Soil Works starts …
We start the huge task of sorting out the site, ready for the main house to be built upon!
The soil is a real mess of old garden rubbish, DIY waste and building rubble from the old little cottage, as well as old metal pipes used back in the days when the whole area was a market gardens plus clay sewage pipes running back and forth too!
We built a large sieve measuring 3feet by 2feet, with an electric powerful off-centre motor (taken from a plate ground compactor) to provide the shake and wiggle. this was mounted into a wooden rramework to hang over the top of the dumper truck to collect the “clean” dirt, to be taken away and tipped onto the mound of soil. The framework was then mounted on to the back of a large flat bed trollet to provide a collecting point for the rubbish and dumped into “ton bags”. These bags were lifted out when full and emptied into the skip.
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Submitted House design to Building Control
We went into Great Yarmouth this afternoon and handed over the package of our construction plans and structural calculations to our new Building Control inspector Kenny Brown.
The package contained 27 pages of A3 drawings, 20 pages of a summary and overview of the project and 150+ pages of calculations!
Now we can start work on the preparations like the site clearance etc.
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Tidying Up site
We have been tidying up the whole site ready for the start of phase 3 – the construction of the main house. The site clearance operation has been seeing various old piles of bricks (clay house bricks) being moved and soon the plants too!
We will have a bonfire to get rid of materials like old shelving which got damaged in the rain, chopped branches and other garden rubbish.
then the old compost heap will be spread across the whole garden to mix it well before the whole area is shoved up onto the mountain of dirt to clear away the top soil and get down to the sand.
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Octagonal Flower Bed finished!
The new raised Flower Bed is finally completed today. The Octagonal shaped constructed of dry bricks (without cement), a mixture of concrete driveway bricks and standard clay bricks. There are 7 layers all together.
It is about 10 square metre of bedding, surrounding the lid of the spectic tank and air vent pipe.
This flower bed is a temporary construction to rescue various plants from around the whole site before they were ruined by phase 3 – the contstruction of the main house!
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Roof Repair on Store room
We took the opportunity to put on a new roof covering on our store room this weekend. It was lovely weather and quite calm thus avoiding the problem of 10metres of roofing felt being blown about!
We bought 5 new rolls of the cheapest roofing garden felt and 3 tins of glue. but after all we only needed one of the new tin as we had an old tin almost full!
We will get our money back on the other two tins!Everything looks good now and hopefully this will be the last time we have to put on a new covering – on either roof!
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Structural Calculations with the Engineer
Finally, the structural calculations I have been performing over the last year have been submitted to our structural engineer. Paul Burrell visited us this morning
and I handed the calculations over to him. He seems impressed with the amount of work I have put into them…. Now we will have to find out if I have done them correctly.
It has been a long journey of discovery and learning, followed by a lot of calculations and drawings. The final report contains 168 pages and 20 A3 drawings! -
Waste disposal
Another of those inevitable expenses involved in demolition work is disposing of the waste. Now that the demolition is complete we have to get rid of all the waste. There is a lot of brick and concrete rubble and some general waste like carpets and other rubbish. The costs are not insignificant, a large skip for the general waste costs £135 (maybe 1.5Tons or £90/Ton) and the rubble costs £144 a lorry load (about 13 tons). But the metals make you money, disposing of the mesh from the rendering made us £30. The video show that it took 5 lorry loads to clear the rubble (£720! For about 60 Tons or £12/Ton). All those are cheap compared to disposing of the Asbestos cement panels from the house which cost £1037 for just 3.3 Tons (£315/Ton)! So all in all waste disposal has cost us 1037+720+135-30=£1862.
Grab lorry removing rubble.
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Chimney Demolition
We have now demolished the chimney stack, which was the last of the demolition tasks! We looked at the structure of the cimney and it was obvoius that it was originally designed for open wood burning fires, but was later retrofitted for burning coal.
The actuall demolition was quite easy using the mini-digger, as you can see from the movie.
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More demolition of the remaining structures.
Shaun has carried on his good work and demolished the outside loo and a old greenhouse.
