Digging The Foundations - July 2009

When I initially drew up the plans for the house, I got together some basic drawing equipment (Paper, Pencils, Eraser, etc), and went about drawing the plans using what I had learned by in school in my Technical Drawing class, and surprise it turned out great (at least I thought so!), but of course I had drawn an English looking house. We took the completed plans down to the Mairie's office in Chabrac, the Mayor came out of his office, and while Jill was speaking to him, telling him what we had done, I could see him looking over his shoulder at the drawings, I could also see him smiling and at that point he said "I'll make you an appointment to see the department architect".

We only had to wait a couple of day's before the appointment came through, so off we went to meet the architect (this was a free meeting), he looked at our plans and preceded to cross mostly everything out (at that point I was feeling a little deflated so say the least), but to be fair he was really helpful and explained everything we had to do to get the plans to an acceptable state.

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Once we got back to the plot, I decided to forget about paper & pencils, and to do all the plans (which were more extensive than we first thought), on the computer. I had a look around the Internet trying to find a suitable program, well that was until I saw some of the prices they were asking, so I decided to go basic and use Microsoft Publisher, and put every single line in individually, and it was surprisingly easy with great results, and it was also very easy to scale everything correctly, it took me about 3 days to get everything ready, and made another appointment to see the Department Architect. This time we had to wait a little longer for an appointment, as he was on holiday, but I couldn't complain about that, and on his return he saw us immediately.

We popped off to our appointment which as luck would have it was just up the road in Confolens, he took a look at our plans, and I think he was pleasantly surprised, this time he just crossed out the roof lights I had put in and said, "change this and re-submit and I will pass your plans". Once we got back home it was just a simple matter of deleting the roof lights, probably took me 5 mins (if that), and we re-submitted then straight away. We waited about 2 weeks, and the plans came back all passed and stamped up, Ye Ha :-)
All we had to do now (because the French just love paperwork) was to make 4 full copies and 3 supplementary copies for various offices and departments (and of course one for us) :-)

So now we have the permission, and the tools necessary it's time to get this show on the road and make a start on building this house.

We've had the digger delivered to site, and we have a driver (Tim) and a builder (Russell) coming to site tomorrow morning.

We started work bright and early the next day, but there was a minor problem, a short while into digging the trenches Tim the digger driver had to stop, he was so used to his JCB he couldn't get a handle on the controls of this particular machine, as all the controls were the opposite to what he was used to, so the just decided to swap over jobs, Russell got in the digger, and Tim got in the trenches. To be honest I wasn't really doing much at this stage, just a labourer, but I was watching and learning. (Video Clip Here)

The trenches were dug in about 4 hours, not quite square, it was a little out, but by the time it was filled with concrete there would be enough tolerance to make some adjustments, and so it was now over to us for the next stage.

Job No 9 Done.