In the trenches

It's been a couple of weeks since any blog action, mainly as you would imagine because other things have been taking precedence. Lots to catch up on if you can hang in there.

Starting where we left off with rainwater, we have dug more of the stones in the French drain out to actually remove the original clay bottle gulleys, as they were deemed an unnecessary risk (smelly/leaky) and likely to need replacing soon anyway.
We have fitted all the gutters, and although they will need some fine tuning in parts are pretty much there. Unfortunately the "truss-rafter-gutter bracket" gamble has not paid off quite as well as we had hoped so the gutter are a little low, but we have a long term idea to modify them with the drill and correct that.

Another development is that the 1st day's screeding work appears to be much crumblier than the 2nd day, and is sanding/chipping/loosening at the surface a bit too much. This is frustrating but the builder has agreed to rectify it with self-levelling compound. We will report back with progress.

Spot the difference

Bad - crumbly

Good - smooth

There have been a few things happen outside as well. The clay soil pipe was exposed and connected on to with no problem, after a bit of innovative angle grinding, by scoring the pipe with the corner of the blade from the oscillating tool. (It turns out we will need a new septic tank, so this exercise was pointless although useful for learning).

DIY tip: Oscillating tool = clay cutter

The highlight, which almost got it's own post, was the Saturday morning trenching session and subsequent progress. 2 things to note: 1) we have water in to the house and 2) we have a mounted electrical meter box, waiting to be giving a new meter a home, and it has a conduit kind of connected! These are very exciting times.

Anderson Plant came up with their 7.5 ton SANY tracked machine, and:

1. They dug out water pipe back to the fence, so that we could fit a new 25mm MDPE pipe all the way to the house at a sub-frost level. Jaimin lowered the north fence, and they crept in & dug it out, he changed the MDPE and then they backfilled.





Nice digger. Better than shovel/pick.






New, ice free pipe.



You may notice in and then out! In. Amazing.



2. They deepened an existing trench from the electricity pylon to the corner of the house to enable us to lay electricity ducting for an underground line.

This enabled Jaimin to lay the very expensive 32mm black electrical ducting, thread a rope through it as a pull cord (using bits of the original lead water pipe as weight), lay the mandatory "Caution - Electrical Cable" marker tape on the cable and at 250mm from surface,  and get ready for installing the meter box!

The meter box installation required some luck as it needed a conduit to take the meter tails (electrical wires from meter to a house's breaker-box ) to be put through the granite wall. Luck was on our side and we got it through in the right place, first time, between the granite! You have no idea how lucky that actually was/is. Jaimin pushed in the pipe/conduit, sprayed some expanding foam, sealed the outside and inside with mortar, then threaded the tails through to the house once it was dry.

The meter box installation was done using 4 M8 100mm hammer fixings so it's pretty solid. The white pipe coming out is the "hockey stick" - a long radius bend 32mm duct to ensure they can get their cable installed.

Ready and waiting to have a new meter. (Almost).

The first floor flooring timber - 28mm T&G whitewood pine, although not fancy in the least, arrived last week and this evening Jaimin carted all 400 linear meters from the track to to the "bedroom space "(are we allowed to call it that yet?) where we hope it will season a bit before installation.

If you've lasted this long, wow, maybe leave us a comment!
And as a reward here are 10 bets you will always win :-).