We were very lucky to have an offer of help from John H and his dad Jim to build the blockwork during Jim’s Easter holidays (he lectures at the College of Building in Glasgow). We couldn’t get the Building Warrant through in time but Building Control were very understanding and suggested using an engineer to certify the foundations, which would bypass the need for them to be involved. The only trouble was that our engineer is based in Perth, so we found Martin Stewart, who lives in Whitehouse, and he agreed to take it on.
Chris had promised us a minimum of nasty concrete and the engineer, who understood timber buildings, had agreed that only unreinforced trench foundations would be required.
John and I had an agreement that all the crucial measurements would be done together. The fact that I wasn’t there was his excuse for not digging out the large amount of solum, specified by Chris, prior to work on the foundations starting.
John and Jim had their work cut out setting up the profiles while Ali was trying to dig out the solum and the trenches but the weather was with us and everyone was feeling positive and excited (and two of us were feeling slightly terrified). This was the first time that Jim and John had ever worked together. They did a brilliant job on the setting out and we were to bless them many times in the future.
It was an exciting moment when Ali made the first dig but soon our feelings of ‘slightly terrified’ proved justified. The house is located at the lowest end of the site, on an area which had been built up and where one of the old cedars had fallen. Even so, the trial pits had not indicated that we would find jelly when we dug the foundation trenches. Everyone stood around and looked into the hole (as you do) and made various suggestions, none of which I wanted to hear. “The engineer will be the one to decide,” I kept saying.
Martin duly turned up in his wellies and poked at the gloop in this corner. He asked Ali to dig deeper and found a decent level about 5 feet down. As it seemed fairly localised, he was happy to add a little reinforcement in that corner and let us continue.
The following day, we had found more jelly and Martin decided that he wasn’t confident to let us proceed. “You’ll probably be all right,” he announced, “but probably isn’t good enough and I wouldn’t sleep at night.” He wouldn’t?
So we called off the readymix and it was back to John Sinclair who had done all the calculations. Everyone went home. It was terribly disappointing to miss the beautiful weather but we just had to wait for John to come down. Everyone tells you that the foundations are the least controllable area of building and once you are out of the ground everything gets easier.
It was a couple of weeks later when John arrived. Another lovely day and he was satisfied that there were no major problems. Apparently when you take the load off clay it does this kind of thing and when you put the load (of the house) back on, it settles again. Even so, he added reinforcement, a stronger mix of concrete and some wings at the corners.
By the time we had his revised foundation drawings, we had lost our two brickies and we were expecting the full drawings for Building Warrant soon anyway, so we continued with clearing the vegetation and decided to go ahead with the garage.