First Attempt At Digging The Foundations  -  July 2009

Had a chat with our friends Gill & Mark, and Mark offered to bring his mini digger over to the plot and dig our foundations for us, which of course sounded great, it would save us some money straight off, no need to hire a JCB & driver, Mark advised us to get an extra wheelbarrow, and he had one that he would bring with him.

The next day Gill & Mark turned up bright and early so we could get a head start before the day got to hot. Mark got the Mini Digger off of the trailer, made sure everything was OK with no major leaks with the hydraulics, everything was fine so we got ourselves (myself, Jill & Gill) prepared  on the wheelbarrows ready to take the spoil away to the top of the plot, however there was a slight problem, Marks Mini Digger was a 3/4 tonne machine, which was great for most jobs, BUT because it was summertime, and it had been hot for a good few weeks, the ground was quite literally Rock hard, and the Mini Digger just couldn't break through the earth!, Mark tried and tried, but after about half an hour Mark had to admit defeat, he didn't want to but the ground was just too damned hard!. I'm guessing had we had started work a few months back in the spring it would have been a different story, but hey ho that's life, and onto plan B :-)  (Video Clip Here)

 

Gill & Mark had previously introduced us to their neighbours Russel & Gail who as luck would have it had a friend that had a JCB and done some work for Russel now and again, so we popped round to see him at his house a few miles down the road, and asked if he could help us our (obviously for a price), and although we were about a 40 minute drive (well, in a normal car) he said OK, the JCB was going to take a bit longer to get to us, but he was fine with that. Unfortunately on the day he was coming he had a major hydraulic leak, which took the JCB out of commission, so we asked him if we hired one from a local company could he drive it for us, to which he said no problem, so were no going for plan C !!

We found a local hire company called SJL in St Junien, we went down to the offices and arranged for the hire of a 5 tonne machine.

The Digger from SJL was delivered to site on the afternoon before we needed it, and although it was tempting to fire it up and have a go, I thought it would be prudent to just let Tim come over and do the job properly, after all he knew what all the controls did and had been operating a JCB for a few years :-)

We'll talk about the actual digging of the foundations on another page :-)

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Job No 7 Done.