Once we’d recovered from the house move, we took another look at the foundation trenches and didn’t like what had happened to them since they were dug. With Alasdair Sloan’s help we squared things up and finished the dig.
After a lot of faffing about (technical term for checking everything twenty times) we commenced pouring concrete on 4th July finishing it off on 5th. Ali Thomson returned to help, with Ali Sloan on digger duty and Robin and Andrew joining in with the hectic bits.
McNaughtons were terrific and driver Stef was most accommodating. The whole thing went really smoothly and it was wonderful to see all those depressing holes filled in.
We had originally thought that we would bring in a squad to lay blocks but John H had made it look so easy with the garage that Suse and I agreed that we would do it ourselves. We were definitely slower than the professionals but everything was square and level when we’d finished and much neater than the equivalent jobs you see on building sites. That said, I wouldn’t put money on our ability to keep things perfectly vertical for much higher!
It was the first constructive job that we’d done on the house itself and it was such a relief to see the back of the “swimming pool” and to see the shape of the house in something other than ‘negative’ at long last. It was the end of an unsettling period and we were grateful to John H and his Dad for the careful setting out of the profiles back in April.
Once everything had gone off we installed the solum drainage, dpc and stone and partially backfilled up to the retaining walls. In order to do this, we had to install some drains, which meant one of those diversions we were coming to expect. There is hardly a job you can do which doesn’t have implications elsewhere.
I think we also fitted some of the wall plates before we dashed off south to buy gabions for the garage at Maccaferri’s in Perth enroute to a Man U v Milan friendly (Jo’s birthday / leaving present).
We left Alistair Sloan with instructions to level the spoil heaps, finish the back filling and dig some ponds. More about this later!