It's 8am on Monday 30th April and there is a genuine digger out there, digging the foundations! Actually right now he's filling in the very large hole made on Saturday when we did our Groundbreaking. At the bottom of the hole is our Foundation Stone. This blog is mainly photos of Saturday's event. It was a lovely day. The muhurta was for 8.05 to 10.20am, and we did the groundbreaking near the beginning of that time and the Foundation Stone near the end. So what was very nice was that the first part was quite private, just us and The Girls and JR to hold our hands and tell us what to do, then other people arrived in time for the seond half. A lot of people down holes digging and other people, needing only the cigar and the bowler hat, watching. Anyway the first hole was dead on square and the second hole, which had to be 1.7m deep, was very large and had steps cut into the side so we could get down.

Pictures - roughly in chronological order:

April 20th and only a week or so till the foundations go in. We saw the Man today - the Building Control man in the Council, that is. All seemed fairly straightforward there - he will turn up about a week on Wednesday to look at the holes in the ground that we expect to be there by then.

The two weeks we had off for Easter were intense - we made the decision to go for timber frame, which set off a domino run of other events - all sorts of other decisions which we had been putting off until we had made the big one. We then spent two days or more doing a reality check on the finances, and we now have a rough idea of how much the whole thing will cost - very scary!
I believe that a horrified look at the total cost is de rigeur when building a house, so we are in good company with everyone else who does a self-build.

As a light diversion from all this mental work and over-exercise of the calculator finger, we spent the last two days of the holidays breaking bricks and carting concrete around the site. The garage is not only demolished, but cleared away and sorted into types for recycling: whole bricks for a path, half-bricks for the soakaway and all the little bits which we will store under the house, on the oversite. This is because it is actually quite expensive to get stuff dumped in landfills these days - a good thing too. We'll be getting rid of enough soil as it is in the foundations. About halfway through the second day I said to R that we must have been prison guards in our last lifetimes and we were now in a position to see it from the point of view of the poor lags breaking stones all day long.

Anyway, here are a few photos, so you can see the changes in the site over the last couple of weeks.


Easy really....

Now there are all kinds of details to pin down - for example, straight after the foundations go in, we start to build the masonry plinth and that the service pipes need to be built in to the blocks of the plinth. And that means that we have to design the kitchen right now so that we know exactly where the sink will be so that the water pipe can come out in the right place. And what I say is - GREAT! I love designing kitchens. And a million other small details.

We did it! Made the decision. D-Day was Wednesday - about time too, I hear you saying.

Two decisons, actually. We are going to risk the cheaper trench-filled foundations, which, on account of being quite deep in a soil with a high water table, are liable to collapse if not sheared up properly and need constant pumping out. We will save quite a lot of money and the Building Control inspector says that not too much can go wrong even if it does collapse - we would just need more concrete to fill up the ensuing hole in the ground. He'll come and look down the 'ole (probably has a bowler hat) and he's a very nice friendly helpful bloke who will hold our hand if we need it.

And we have decided to go for timber frame. On Tuesday we went to the timber frame company who have given us a good quote for a house with 300mm I-beam walls and floor and a 400mm I-beam roof. We were impressed with their system and their good common sense in constructing what seems like a simple and effective build. Then we went to see the Building Control officer, and then we came home to find a good quote on a labour-only basis from a blockwork builder.

So on Wednesday morning we started working out the costs of materials for the masonry system, to compare it with timber frame. We had already been to Jewsons who will work out the materials cost for you from a drawing, and so we had a lot of figures already, but they all had to be crunched and sorted to fit the build. We started at about 9am and by 3pm we had decided to go for the timber frame even though (on account of its high spec) it is a bit more expensive. If we went for the masonry construction everything would have taken longer and, more importantly, we would have to deal with the ordering and storage of a lot of different materials. Plus, with timber frame, we can get the house up and weatherproof in time for the summer holidays, when we will have six weeks to work on the house.

So that's the story. Our Maharishi Sthapatya Veda foundation stone will be installed at the end of this month and the foundations are due to start straight after. That will take a couple of weeks, then we have (yet to find) someone to build the blockwork plinth. So the timber frame should be going up in June.

In the meantime we (I) had a great time demolishing the garage! R is now carefully sorting the demolished bricks to go in the very long garden wall we are going to build, starting in the next half-term. He's also shifted a little wooden shed which means that we now have an almost clear space and we can see from one end of our (not exactly vast) site to the other. It's great to get the whole picture.

More photos next time....

We move along - onwards and upwards!