The first cut is the deepest …
Architects' sketch of the renovation/extenstion
No, this post is not about the 1967 hit single by Cat Stevens, but rather it chronicles the next stage of our renovation and extension. After the demolition phase, the scene was set for a week of excavation on a biblical scale. As shown in the architects' sketch above, one of the new features is a double garage under the house and an area under the deck for a large water tank. To make way for these additions, extensive clearing in front of and underneath what remains of the original house was needed.
The excavation proceeded in several stages.
1. Farewell to the formal French garden
In one of my first posts on this blog (Halfway there, 10 August 2020), I recounted how Cath
discovered a structure in our front garden that might possibly have been the
footings of a shed of some sort. We used this area first as a small veggie
garden and then we turned it into a formal garden with bruxus hedging forming a
cross with a birdbath located in the center, a feature that Knut promptly turned into his own private water bowl. The spaces between the bruxus were filled up with bright annuals to provide a splash of summer colour. Sadly, this garden was the first
casualty of the excavation.
September 2023 - The birdbath at the centre of the French garden
October 2024 - The denouement
2. The stairs to nowhere
The previous owners of our property added a living area to the existing farm cottage in around 2014. The extension changed the access to the house so that the previous front stairs became redundant. Interestingly, they chose to leave the stairs in place rather than remove them. The fact that the stairs now had no function and led up to the wall of our bathroom, prompted us to label them as the stairs to nowhere. When the digger got around to removing them, the scale of the concrete in their construction gave more than a hint at why they had been left untouched.
The stairs to nowhere
Stairs no more
3. Demolishing Alcatraz
After dealing with the stairs to nowhere, the next big hurdle was removing the footings of the existing house. This proved rather troublesome as they turned out to be large enough and strong enough to support a fortress, and with enough embedded steel reinforcing to reconstruct the Titanic. In a first attempt, our digger driver tried to pull the footings over, but nearly succeeded in upending his machine instead. He then had to resort to the painstaking job of breaking the concrete with a jackhammer attachment. This slowed progress down as it took at least half a day to reduce the footings to rubble small enough to be dealt with by the digger bucket.
Breaking reinforced concrete with a jackhammer
4. The cut
Having dealt with the stairs and the footings, the scene was set for the cut under the existing house. This required a great deal of patience and skill as at times the boom of the digger was operating under the existing structure. The task was further complicated by the fact that huge rocks were hidden in the clay soil. Their extraction was a delicate operation to ensure that none of the props holding up the house were disturbed. The amount of fill that came out of the cut was simply mind blowing. Luckily a neighbour of ours was on the lookout for clean fill so the dumper trucks which were hired to remove it only had a 5 minute drive down the road to unload. Even better from our perspective was that the disposal didn't cost anything.
A pretty deep cut
The final word must be in praise of the digger driver. He turned out to
be an amazing artist whose palettte and brush was the boom and bucket of
his digger. He was also was happy to work very long hours to get the
job done while the weather was favourable. His final act was to was to dig the trenches and pier holes for the footings.
Some of the pier holes were over 2m deep
The site is now ready for the next phase in which the build will rise out of the ground. Watch this space ...
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