Week #17: Phase 3. The Steps of Woe. Friday 25/6/21

 Up early to get fleeced by the wood yard. On their website they're selling 2.4 Mtr sleepers for £20, when you get there, they're nearly £30! "Yeah we can't update our website fast enough, we buy them in and we don't know how we're going to have to pay for them, so yeah the price has gone up and I dunno how much they'll be for the next lot". Nice work if you can get it I guess.

So that was £112.00. On a roll and wanting to get shot of even more money we went into PGR on the way home and ordered the MOT Type 1 - 3 bags of the stuff + delivery using a Hiab, that came to £180 ish and that'll be delivered on Wednesday. So things are moving along at a pace now.

Here's Fridays activities...

Has some help in the last couple of days from Ben. Anyone that's in this business will probably laugh at our efforts, but here they are anyway. It may be the case that the whole lot caves in on itself, but looking at the arrangement and construction of the previous retaining wall and step my father in law Chris built nearly 40 years ago, I reckon what we've done will probably be good for a few years. This section though with these sleeper is probably the sketchiest....

Here's the sleepers we bought this morning. They're cut to 1.5 and are sunk into the ground to the same depth as the Gabions.

Ben below digging out the hole to set the Sleeper in.

This set of sleepers is the most problematic as they retain the largest amount of garden. Thankfully in engineering terms the majority of the force is at the base of the mass being retained. We're using loads of slabs to create the foundations of the steps, so the base of the 'Wall' seems to us to be secure.

The pressure lessons higher up the wall and we build the steps we'll be packing in as many concrete slabs to try and ensure the was is unable to be pushed in.

We have a contingency plan which we can put in place at a later date if this proves to be inadequate. which would be attach cable or thick nylon rope to the top of these longest sleepers and attach the other end well into the center of the garden to a lump of concrete to secure them further. 

Behind the sleepers at the base we've put another slab to prevent a pivot affect (See diagram below). 

This image here shows a dry run using the old paving slabs. These slabs are what we're building the foundations of the steps with, but we're using them in the short term in order that we can go up and down the steps whilst working, so as to not damage the nice slabs and getting them filthy.

We also use them to test how the slabs will work in a real life situation. As I've said before, I've not seen anything on the internet with regards how you make these steps, so everything we're doing is experimental. At the moment the theory is the Sandstone slabs will simply sit on top of the Gabions so we're trying to get the level of the gabions and the foundations exactly the same so that they're flush/level to facilitate that, but we're keeping an open mind about how successful or unsuccessful that might be. We've noted that these massive slabs break easily if on uneven surfaces. So it's a case of watch this space as we learn.

Goal for the day achieved - four steps in place along with the sleeper. You can see as the steps get high they're reducing the chance of the sleepers to be forced inwards.

Final image at the bottom here is the end of day image showing how far we've got.

Added up the costs today. So far £2600.