Bank Holiday Weekend

It's been a while since the last update - most of the groundwork has already been done so we've been waiting for the guys that do the piling to come round. This is scheduled for Wednesday 29th May - tomorrow.

In the meantime though things have been busy, plenty of stuff to do in the other garden (wired up the lights at last!), the decorating in the Study is very nearly complete and of course, there's been some important fishing time needed:

Nice one Bonz!

Breakfast on the beach

So, back to work on the extension and the main job on Saturday 25th May was to break up the last remains of the concrete:

At some point I'll rotate the clip .......

It needed some super human strength - lucky I was around huh?

Grrrrr

Final piece to break up

All done!

Saturday 11th May

Today is Fredo's Birthday - so no work today!

Instead, I've put up some vids of the first three days.......

Oh, by the way, really sorry Ralph (for Ziggy biting your finger on Wednesday!)

Friday 10th May

The guys from the piling company came round on Wednesday to check out the lie of the land. All ok generally, but still some concrete that needs moving......no worries.

Mind the car dude

Today, the grabber lorry came and took away the mound of topsoil.

Franco swung his pick axe and broke up the rest of the patio.

Ehh, you talkin' ta me?

And it's Alfredo's birthday tomorrow - we've bought him a brick-laying course.

Shhhhh don't tell him, he'll be so excited!!

Monday 6th May

zzzzzzzzz ........8-30am and the knock at the door signals the start of (groundhog) Day 3.

Target for the day - clear the rest of the topsoil from the garden and dump it on the mound so it can be taken away later by the grabber lorry. 

The ground itself is part of a large railway embankment, so in terms of the building regs, the foundations must be based around a piling system. When the garden is cleared we can mark out the position for the 9x piles that will each be sunk 3m down, and these will form the "frame" to connect the footings to.

Having plenty of workers available meant that Tim could take on the role of site supervisor and director of operations ........well, that's his excuse, but it may have had more to do with sitting in Simon & Debbie's garden the evening before ........hic!

Keep it going guys

What do you reckon Zigs?

Roll out the barrow ...

All done, put the kettle on!

Sunday 5th May

Day 2.

The Sun is shining, the wall is down, all we have to do is to take off a foot of topsoil from the garden. No point in killing ourselves, it's a bank holiday and we have two days - plenty of help and a really small asthmatic sausage dog called Ziggy, perfect!

Half way there!

Saturday 4th May

So, where do we start?

Work began on the extension on Saturday 4th May 2013. The first thing we had to do was to knock the wall down and as far as possible, keep all the bricks whole and clean, hmmmm..... we didn't do a bad job on that, only a few breakages.

Here's a few photos of the first day and I'll add some videos later:

Nash warming up

Franco getting himself prepared

The wall is gone!