We had our second site meeting with the builder on the weekend, and as it was 8am by we I mean me. There was nothing particularly interesting to report other than that soon there should be a lot of interesting things to report.
The big news for the meeting is that we now have a sign on the front gate. The builder has recently re-branded so our sign was hot off the press number one. It was clearly popular with the locals with a cloud of midges hanging out in front of it all morning. I patiently waited for them to get out of the shot but apparently it was the place to be. Thankfully once I shrunk the photo down for this you can’t really see them.
The slab is due to be formed up next Saturday so other than a couple of the waste pipes having to be moved and a few potential deliveries there will not be a lot happening on site this week.
Something I have often heard in the past and it has rung true for me so far is that things are much better once you get out of the ground. In our case this will be once the slab is there. Getting out of the ground can be where some of the nasty money surprises come from. If all goes well you will have nothing but solid ground where you want to put your house, if not you might have a small long lost cellar that needs to be filled in and in the case of someone I know I imagine it went something like this,
Builder: “so…it turns out the whole back of your block is loose fill from something or rather in the past”
Owner: “ok…what does that mean”
Builder: “Well…um…we need to go down 12m with screw piles and then build the slab to be self supporting on top of that”
Owner: “A lot of concrete?”
Builder: “yep, more than you can imagine”
Unfortunately when ground problems pop up its generally not a case of tipping some dirt in. This becomes the realm of ‘controlled fill’, engineers can get involved and it can get interesting fast. In the case of the small long lost cellar I referred to above, I once saw a job where a unknown cellar entrance ramp was found. In that case they cut their losses and filled the whole thing with concrete.