Week #6 - Wednesday

Wednesday 7th April I should sort the dates on the blog out and just post as normal instead of faffing about with the dates. From now on the newest post will appear first and I'll gradually sort all the rest out as I go along.

The good news is the Grabber lorry came and took all the dirt away. Only took 20 mins and cost me £280. I've ordered the Cobbles tonight as well that was another £368, so the cost is going up and up. These wont be delivered till Friday 23rd which is a long time when I want to get on with it. We've got 2 bags for that price and I'm hoping that's enough. I'm following a woman on Youtube who recently made a massive Gabion wall in her garden and she explains all the pitfalls you can make and she details all of the costs she incurs. Looking her wall, she has what appears to be 31 metres squared and potentially another 12 square metres at least on top and yet she covered all of this with just 6 bags of cobbles. I've about 10 square metres to cover so potentially a 3rd or less, so two bags should do it by my reckoning? I've emailed Karen with this question, if the tally at the end is correct, I should easily get away with 2 bags.

The Grabber was so effective, we almost over-did it with the bloke taking away too much. Luckily Ben said he reckoned we should stop otherwise we'd have to add earth when it gets to the re-grassing stage. Once the lorry had gone and we spread it around a bit Ben was right.

Then in the afternoon Joe and I turned to the steps. Some of the steps are too wide and wont allow for the Gabions to fit in the gap so we had to move them around and cut one of them down. We did this simply by chiseling two lines across the stone either side and the chunk just fell off of its own accord, it took about 10 or 15 mins chipping away at it with a blunt cold chisel. We then removed more of the earth on the edges of the steps and then turned our attention to the shingle we'd put down a few days ago.

We'd hastily put the stones down without the membrane, so we raked all of these up and then I took a look at the level of the base area where the Gabions will go and did some more work on the slope, trying to get it more level. That seemed to go okay. In the meantime the Geotextile stuff turned up, so with a bit of luck the Gabions will arrive tomorrow. 

The shot above is the Neolithic style mound just before the Grabber lorry has arrived. We've taken the fence down between us and our neighbours house in the event that the fence gets damaged. The shots below are once the earth has all been moved. 

In the image above you can see that the paving stone step at the top is bigger than the rest so we had to remove this and cut it down to fit lower down. With the use of a big old electric saw of some sort we had to go 'Stoneage' on it...

This worked well having marked both sides, going across the 2nd side for about the 2nd or 3rd time it just fell in half which was a touch as we thought we'd be doing this for another 30 - 40 mins given how far we'd got through the surface. In the end it was a matter of about 2-3mm before it snapped.

Here's the new improved steps which are only temporary. With more earth removed so the sides are even. The dirt that was dug out went up the top to level out what will be the lawn area.

Friday 2nd Apr - (Week 5)

 Friday - Productive day today...

Saturday 3rd Apr (Week 5)

 Saturday 

Rang the grabber lorry firm today and it turns out that I'm going to have to pay for a full load and it's going to cost £280. The bloke Danny said he'll come by on Monday and have a look at the situation and let me know whether it's possible or not. To be honest I'm worried he's going to say no in which case we face the nightmare scenario of either digging it all out again and putting in skips or wheeling down the road a few yards and leave it in the car parking bays at the back of the house.

Anyway - that's it 98% of the digging is done and this is how it looks today...

Thursday 1st April (Week 5)

 Thursday - Productive day.

Tuesday 30th March (Week 5)

 Today was going to be a bit of a rest day, but I went out into the garden and the bloke doing my neighbors garden were there working, so I went and spoke to the bloke and asked him if he'd have a look our pile of dirt and what we still had to dig out and how much he reckoned that would cost to take away. He looked at it and said "Yeah that's half a load, that'll be around £180 if they can do two jobs in one run". 

I the noticed the skip they were using for all their waste and it was full of goodies so I went back asked the neighbor can we take some rubble and stuff from the skip and he said yes. So we had a look and got a load more hardcore and about a bin and half of sand. 

Having done that we then started to have a bit of a dig and one thing led to another and the next thing I knew we were all out there again working. 

Realising that the pile was getting increasingly big I deployed a tactic of cutting the clay in slices and piling them neatly on top of one another leaning in to contain any additional earth/clay as it came out, creating an on-going succession of new flat areas to pile the loose earth and clay and this gave us the capability to pile it higher in a far more efficient manner. 

So to today's pic's...

This is about 2pm, the last of the brickwork and its foundations are beginning to come out. Look at the pile of dirt and you can we've adopted a more organised stacking method rather than just randomly throwing it on in a heap, its placed on in slabs that angle in towards the centre.

Joe in action - getting his back into a section of wall.

Joe in action with the sledge hammer breaking one of the big chunks into more manageable sizes.

End of the day images above and below...

Almost all of the wall has gone now, the last bit stacked against the wall in the picture above. There's a massive monolith of a stone just visible on the right hand side in this image.

The stack of rubble under the ramp is growing, but there's not going to be a lot more.

We reckon there's another 2 days or work here yet and then it'll be time to get the muck away lorry in to take the earth away, so once that's gone we'll order the gabions. I've got to look at the possibility of using 0.75 metre gabions which would need to be custom made and therefore more expensive, but we'd gain more space at the bottom.

Just seen this on a webiste that I was looking at black paving slabs on https://www.milesstone.co.uk/collections/walling-rockery/products/gabion-rock

This stuff takes about 1.4 tonnes to fill a cubic metre Gabion and it's quite a good price £75 a tonne. Remember you don't actually fill the Gabion full of this good quality stuff, this only faces and tops the gabion. The bulk of the filling is done with rubble and waste concrete etc, so it's a case of figuring how much rock you need to the facing and topping.

The weather's going to deteriorate over the coming few days with the chance of snow on Monday, so I'm going to get all the tarps out and keep everything as dry as possible as it's sticky enough as it is. 

Monday 29th March (Week 5)

 Another hot sunny day and Joe and I got on with it. Plan to get the section at the bottom all dug out. 

The last part of the bottom section mean that we had to move all the bricks and rubble that had been stacked where the spade is in the picture (Left). The bricks were all moved under the ramp and tided up and a lot of the pebbles and small pieces of rubble which will form the base on which the gabions will be placed on are now being stored in bins and container on the top section.

The earth pile at this stage is quite small, but just about to grow in size and I was aware of this. So I then got some old scaffold boards from the garage and placed them along the edge of where we're going to be digging to. The grassed area already slopes, so we spent some time spreading the clay over the grass in order to try and rectify the slope, but we've been warned that as the earth settles in the rain over time it will shrink down and compress, so we probably need to level it up to the top of the scaffold boards (See picture) 

By the time we finished up at 6pm we'd been joined by my other son Ben and so the speed in which the work was getting done rapidly increased...

Here you can see the bricks now stacked under the ramp. The big yellow bag is slowly filling up with top soil..

In this shot you can see how big the pile is. Down the road from me another bloke is having his garden landscaped and I asked the builders about Muck away companies and what they do in terms of how they price up the job and he asked me...

"How much have you got"?

"What - in terms of cubic metres"?

"No... tonnes". Me thinks how the hell would I know? But from the rest of the conversation it sounded like this here might already cost me over £200 to be taken away which isn't good. So I'm going to call them tomorrow, but I'll be scuppered if they ask how much I've got in terms of weight. So finger crossed it's not going to be anywhere near that price!

I also asked about reaching over the bush and wall and he seemed to think that it wasn't a problem at all.

Week #4

 I've started to look into getting a company to come in a move the muck away. The plan being we did the dirt out and leave it up on the lawn and then a lorry comes along with a grabber and takes it away. The first company I contacted didn't come this far into Essex, so I went looking for a company more local and in doing so I tripped across some of their other services including mini and micro diggers. Micro diggers it seems are able to get through a standard door, so potentially could get through our back gate?

So currently I'm looking at this site here - https://www.essex-digger-hire.co.uk/ which have Micro diggers for hire at £60 a day it seems...

This represents a massive move forwards in terms of getting the job done.

Sunday 28th (Week 4)

 Weekend 27th March (Sunday)

Had Joe helping today and we had a go at breaking down the wall. It was a bit tricky and the neighbours complained about the noise (It was only 6pm), so we stopped and did some digging and separating of the top-soil. We were using the green crate to move the dirt from the bottom to the top of the garden and that needed 2 of us doing it and it was a bit awkward as the tray when full of heavy clay is damn heavy. 

Monday 28th March - 

A lot or progress today. Last night I spent a lot of time weighing up the idea of using the Micro digger and did some research and it seems that by the time you've factored in the cost of the digger being delivered and then got it insured you're probably looking at £160 - £180. That combined with the fact that as the digger digs the dirt out and piles it up, it'll increasingly be more difficult to get the digger back out of the garden because of the size of it. There's also the fact that I'm not convinced that the reach will be sufficient and whether that easy to use. 

Plan. With Joe getting involved, the plan was to see how much we could get done digging the dirt out manually and see how big the pile would be at the end of the day and generally get a sense of how feasible the whole thing would be. 

Start of the day Monday...

So as we dig the clay out we're putting it in builders buckets having tried the green tray. The green tray is too big and heavy and requires 2 of us to move it and we found a bucket at a time is sufficient.

All of the top soil is scraped off and sieved and that's being put in the big yellow bag and stored under the ramp (See in picture below). 

There's lots of stones and rocks and these are being taken out where possible and these are kept aside for use later on for the base that the Gabion will need to be placed on.  

The main issue at the moment is whether the Muck away truck will be able to operate over the wall. By my estimations it'll easily do it if the reach is 7 metres, but I feel I need to get this confirmed as I know my neighbor did the same thing with the expectation of the truck being able to go over his hedge and it turned out that it couldn't and he then had to move all the dirt out of his garden into a skip, So I'd rather not keep unloading into the garden if we'll need to move it again. 

Bought some stuff today - a spade and some gloves x 3 pairs £32.00. Overall spend now £44.00. Total hours spent now 25.5 hrs.

The images below show how it looks by the end of the day.