Extension Part 4 - The Hole

Roy came back on Friday to dig the porosity test hole whilst I was over at Allan's for the next session in our best-of-25 match number 4.

The bad news is that he hit rock about a metre down. Thinking about it afterwards we should not have been totally surprised - there was a small quarry behind Margaret's farm. The bucket load of water Paul had thrown down the hole was showing no signs of soaking away.

Craig from Building Control came over on Monday to take a look. He picked the moment it started tipping it down. There we were in wellies with brollies looking at a big muddy and puddle-filled hole. Craig took some photos and was hopeful we could get around the problem of a soakaway with a 'rumbling drain' and would get back to us. He phoned later that afternoon to say this would be okay and we made an appointment to see him this morning to discuss the details and some other issues that had come to light - the main one being getting the grey water from our proposed utility room linked into our sewerage system.

It was stair-rodding it down this morning, so much so that the dogs refused to go out. We hadn't re-covered our hole so now it is more like a pond.

We saw Craig at 11 a.m. and the news is hopeful. As we are laying a path from the utility room down the side of the house our waste-pipe does not need to be as deep as otherwise if it is located under the path, so it looks very likely we will be able to achieve the required drop when we reach the rodding point at the front of the house. We will find out for sure when the builder comes round next week to measure the levels. The other good news is that we can position our proposed gates a lot closer to the road than we had thought - there are no actual restrictions as long as we are sensible - so we will be able to enclose a much larger area.

I had also received quotes and a rough sketch of the proposed design for the gates/railings from David (blacksmith) last week. I phoned him this morning to say I was happy with them, but proposed a small change to the detail which he said would not be a problem - it was likely that there would be other changes once the building work has been done and we have a better idea of what it all looks like...