4000 holes!

Well, maybe I exaggerate a little - not quite 4000 holes but 3 fairly sizeable Trial Pit holes dug on Tuesday for the structural engineer's delectation and delight on Wednesday do seem to have generated substantially more spoil than I thought they would...

Here we can at least be reassured that the kitchen (built 1969) does have proper foundations going down almost a metre on to proper concrete footings - hurray!

Kitchen north wall trial pit

 The second pit was in the lawn and so posed much less entertainment to our trusty builder chums, thankfully.  Unlike Trial Pit 3....

Lounge pillar corner West wall

This little baby proved somewhat more troublesome. After levering up the crazy paving stone slabs, builder Phil and I were greeted by the perturbing sight of lots of very solid concrete underneath the patio - an old path around the house, maybe?  Preliminary investigations involving cutting a 5 x 5 inch cube of the concrete cut using his trusty angle grinder thingy revealed that this 'path' or whatever it was is about 4-5 inches thick. This does not a happy builder make.

However, as the pillar corner is the most structurally suspicious it was crucial that this pit was dug here so teeth were gritted and major cutting work commenced....

Close up pillar corner West wall

Eventually we were able to see the base of the wall here - but yet more concrete about a foot out from the wall! Even harder this time, and discovered to be over the (blissfully no longer in service) old clay drain which used to run from round the corner from the old kitchen.  A bit paranoid that the remaining old cast iron gutter downpipe might still discharge via this one, I tested it with a watering can full of water and thankfully it did not appear here! Whew. Well, one nagging old doubt answered - the old drain is disused and so even if still present under the 'new' kitchen, is not functional at all.

Of course in the process of delving deeper into this hole we also started getting answers to some other nagging old doubts....The corner pillar sits on a sizeable old stone 'pad stone' (just visible as the more grey lump of stone in the upper right hand of the hole) which then simply sits on the clay.

Alongside this old pad stone we can see the 1969 slab of 4 inch concrete sitting on 4-5 inches of hardcore...sitting on the clay.  No foundations here then.  Hmmm...structural engineer explained that this is why the inside is cracking - the differential movement between the 60s concrete sitting on the clay and the undatedable pad stone sitting on the clay.  And by god, what clay it is!  I knew the soil was clay based in the garden - it's much heavier than the old Stone Cottage garden soil.  But all the flower and veg beds here have been worked and improved over at least 35 years if not longer and so to actually see the raw unadulterated orangey brown clayness under the lawn and here under the walls was quite surprising.  But at least we know now.  Information can only be a good thing, surely???

All in all, the outcomes discovered from the holes weren't too bad - the pillar corner will have to be strengthened substantially during the extension works, but we did expect that really.  Probably the whole of the old pillar will be removed along with the offending west wall end and completely renewed, so the engineer was not particularly concerned about the other cracking in the west wall - it's all being knocked out after all.  I'm trying to train myself to breathe a little easier about the whole thing.  We are doing the right thing, I know it.  We just need to brace ourselves to pay for it!

Today, (Saturday) we experienced the Law of Holes....what comes out, never EVER will all go back in!

Kitchen north wall pit 'refilled'

Lawn pit 'refilled' - with huge quantity of leftover clay spoil

So our collection of unusable rubble continues to grow.  More sacks gathering at the end of the drive hoping some helpful farmer might take them away for use in his muddy gateways?

In a desperate attempt to prevent A from simply dumping all the clay spoil on my precious compost heap, I spent a stressful hour with him marking out my new cut flower beds just using stakes, so that he could barrow the clay spoil over there and basically tip it on as the 'base' layer, to have much scrummier stuff piled on top at some later date, just like I did last spring with the new no-dig veg beds....well, it worked for the veg, so fingers crossed it will work for the flowers too.

However, I still get that frustrating feeling that I am continuously playing chess with piles of 'stuff' both inside the house and outside in the garden.