Foundations complete, still a leak!

The beginning of this week saw the completion of the foundations. So all is running along, more or less, smoothly.

The only issue at present is what seems to be the always present water leak! We've had Southern Water to site on about 3 occasions, each time I call I'm told that the leak has been fixed, whilst our groundwork team tell us otherwise. The key problem is that it's the old property's water main - a nice old fashioned metal pipe with no locatable stop-cock. As the "nice" SW representative told me on the phone, we are responsible for the pipework our side of the stop-cock, so I kindly informed him that SW were therefore obliged to tell us where said stop-cock was located!

Luckily, whilst Keri was on site taking the photo's below, an Engineer turned up. Initially they thought it was a faulty valve, replaced that and still the leak persisted. Next up was a radio tracker, whereby they tracked the pipe to our boundary and then picked it up again at the roadside - I'm convinced the original stop-cock is located in the garden of what is now the new property built in front (completed in 2007). Anyway, the upshot is that SW are going to excavated where they picked it up by the roadside and finally fix it.

In the meantime, the first lot of below DPC materials have been delivered to site and, as I write this post, the brick layers should be getting on with the blocks you see in the photo.



The Signage by the road on entrance to site - a nice mock-up of how the house will eventually look.


The first delivery of blocks to site... not quite an action photo :o)

We've got piles!

No, not the sort from sitting on damp ground for too long. Although there has been plenty of dampness from those pesky water pipes from the old house.

The piling work has been making progress, though according to the logs they've managed to go further down than initially quoted. The original quotation indicated an average of 8m, even though the site survey and exploration bore holes indicated around 10.5m. The actual piles have gone down between 9 - 13m. It's going to make a bit of impact on our contingency fund, literally pouring money in to the ground!

Foundation materials are due on site in just over a week and the following week are the blocks for the ground floor. It'll be around then that we start taking regular photos as the skin of the building begins to appear out of the ground.

Here are a few photos of our piles for those interested.




The Piling Machinery




Piles in and the concrete poured


After the initial concrete, the steel mesh will be laid for the concrete ring beam on top of the pile.