We finally broke ground on Monday 16th June and a hot dry week has allowed progress to be rapid (at least through the eyes of novices who have never seen a house being built before!) We have a great team on the groundworks, skilful and hard working. It’s amazing what Graham our digger driver can do with his multi-tonne digger - sprinkling a one stone layer of chippings to raise the sub-base level by 25mm is a sight to behold.
Talking of stone, I hadn’t imagined quite how much stone would be involved in our build, approx 200 tonnes - that’s ten large tipper trucks. Two layers of stone, each to a depth of 150mm, are needed under the concrete raft foundations. Additional stone is needed outside of the house itself for the driveway and to have a clean working environment - our soil is clay and very quickly turns to claggy mud, which is not easy to work in and later on in the build would get distributed throughout our house interior if we we didn’t take precautions. We also need a stable base for the crane which will come into lift the SIP panels into position.
As well as stone coming in we have subsoil to go out (all our good, top soil is staying on site to be used for landscaping and ground buildup where required). We were keen to minimise the amount of truck miles (and hence the carbon footprint) involved during this stage so fortunately our ground workers managed to find a company who would take away a load of spoil in the same truck which delivered the stone.
We are not fans of HS2 rail link which is being built close by to Harbury and is leaving a destructive scar on the landscape, including the destruction of thousands of ancient trees and other wildlife habitats. One of the consequences of HS2 means there is a scarcity of certain building materials and infrastructure - stone included! In our case, HS2 has bought up so much of the local stone that we had to go further afield to source what we needed (unfortunately an increase in our carbon footprint).
By the end of week 1 we have ducting in, below the stone sub-base, for water, electricity and internet and a soil pipe for waste.
A neat feature of the Wunderhaus design is that the three bathrooms are all in the same vicinity in the house with one larger bathroom on the first floor, which serves the master bedroom, stacked on top of two ground floor bathrooms. This means all the waste water from loos, showers, baths etc can all go into one soil pipe which runs up through the wall cavity.
Week 1 also saw a visit from our Building Control inspector to check the work and site were meeting the regulations. All good 👍
By the end of the week we also have the first layer of stone in place and compacted. Next week is the second layer of stone and construction of the steel cages which reinforce the concrete.
See Progress for a few more images of what has happened on site this week.
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