Gonna Build a house! #4

Happy Sunday!

The sun is shining this morning but yesterday was a day of contrasting weather.

7th March

The wind blasted in a south- easterly direction making it a bit cold while I was doing a first varnish coat on my new fence. During 25 years of occupying the house, I never felt the need to have a fence blocking off this part of my garden, but with a toddler of 3 and a half, and a baby of almost 1 year, a fence is now necessary.

This is especially important since the traffic using our driveway now includes that heavy plant for the building of the new house out the back.

So what progress has been made since #3 post about 'Gonna Build a House!'? 

28th February

Building regulations for self-build houses are stricter than they used to be (I'm told) so, as stated before, a lot of intense effort and planning goes into the foundations. The double block walls of the foundation brieze blocks, in the photograph to the right, show the gap where the anchoring of the kit frame will be inserted. All of this anchoring will be well under ground level.
 
When the brickwork was properly dried out (after about 4 days), the next stage was to in-fill the interior with hardcore. 


The hardcore was brought to the site by the lorry load and packed in using the small digger and the larger Komatsu. Once the layering was done a compacting machine was used to pound it down. This was a fairly noisy process which, you can imagine, drew a lot of attention from my grandkids.

4th March

After a number of hours of constant work, the area was looking quite different again. A lot flatter and very tidy.

5th March

The wait now begins.

Again the site is left to settle. At this stage, the builder informs me that it doesn't matter if we have heavy rain since it would 'bind' the materials together but in the nature of nature - our weather is behaving amazingly well for early March.

Saturday temperatures were around 14 Deg Centigrade during the day, and 12 deg C at midnight. That would be termed higher than seasonal normal.

The next stage may not happen for a while (perhaps not for a couple of weeks) but that will be to lay specialised insulation material on top of the interior of the foundations- prior to laying concrete flooring.

Keep popping in to catch the next part of 'Gonna build a house'. 

Slainthe!