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.