Week 19: Phase 3: The steps: Week commencing July 5th.

 Monday writing at 00.30 - weather doesn't look too clever for the first part of this week, heavy rain and gales for today and more rain Tuesday. Let's see what happens.

Little bit of work Monday night before it rained. Joe made the last Gabion. I've started to move stuff around readying for Phase 4 - The patio. I'm not sure whether I need to get a skip as I've got a feeling there's going to be a fair bit of mud coming out over the next couple of weeks.

I'm kind of nervous about this next bit because of the costs involved and not wanting to make any mistakes. The damp course aspect is worrying me and that'll relate to how I dig out, but tonight doing my research I've found this video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGhvkVdBCMY  and the bloke recommends that 2 courses of bricks should be above the surface (Driveway/patio). Alternatively as I've seen before, the patio can be higher if you have a gap that's filled with rocks/shingle to allow any water to drain away. I need to photograph what the situation is at the moment and what I've dug out already and ask someone for their advice. There's other videos that show the slabs against the wall and they have 2 complete bricks visible above the level of the slabs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNU9ECnVPVE

When I can, I reckon I'll take up a few more paving slabs and then start to prepare one half of the area that I need to cover.

Other complicated aspects include the laying of the slabs, there's a couple of conventions that you should stick to  (1) No cross joints (2) No straight lines longer than 3 slabs. Sounds pretty straight forward till you start to do it. I cut out some bits of paper proportionally the size of my slabs and then spent the best part of 4 hours trying to come up with a working template for the order my slabs will be laid. Here's the pattern...

Tueday 6/7/21 More rain, but I've had some ideas...

(1). Im concerned about the damp proof aspect and feel inclined to put a drainage border around the slabs so they don't butt right up against the wall. Similarly with the patio slabs being put down with a slope all of the rain water that drains off will end up at the base of the gabions and potentially form a puddle? The diagram above shows how I might address this issue using some of the waste that we've either got around or will generate over the coming weeks. 

(F) Is a 8" x 8" gabion cage in the same style as the steps - we've got a fair bit of this left so we can use that for the main drain as such. So the intention is dig a trench and line that with the 25mm -40mm stones (E)  that are under the concrete slabs that we've got at the moment. Then put the gabions in and fill them loosely with broken up bits of the concrete slabs (D) that we're about to take up. Then on top of that use the remainder of the cobbles that we've got left to make it look decent - might need to add some smaller cobbles which we'll have to buy. That as far as I'm concerned should be a fairly decent drain? *Note before finishing I'll wrap the gabion in geotextile so that there's no slow ingress of dirt/dust/leaves etc that'll clog up the drain. 

On the house side we wont use the gabions, instead just dig a smaller trench and line it with geotextile fabric, then the 25mm - 40mm stones, finished with the big cobbles...

The diagram here shows a cross section of the plan, but having shown Ben and looking at how much mesh we've got left, we're almost certainly going to scrap using the gabion (F) and just put the stones in loose as in the left hand side of the digram, but still wrap them in Geotextile. 

No work today...

This isn't a puddle this is looking out through our glass roof. 

This is the thing that concerns me the most. On the left is the existing paving slabs which sit a brick and a half below the painted part of the wall. I'm guessing the white part of the wall is above the damp course? These slabs have a gravel margin (not easy to see because the clay's got mixed in with the gravel. To the right is where I've removed the slabs and then dug down through a bed of pebbles and dirt. 

At the moment, I'm thinking If I dig dig enough out to lay about a bricks depth of MOT once it's compacted and then a bed of cement with a slab will leave approx one brick exposed. I'll also have a margin around the edges of the slabs. I've just seen this website and this has details about the use of a drainage gap https://www.pavingexpert.com/dpc01

Been thinking about the drainage and feeling that there needs to be some structure e.g. a box so I've been looking around and see these - https://www.sure-green.com/steel-welded-wire-panels.html

This evening I did an experiment at the bottom of the steps - going back to the idea of putting a Gabion in a hole as part of the drainage system... 

So the starting point is this...

This is the bottom of the steps before we've moved the clay and put any MOT down, So you can see water easily collects at the bottom of the steps and once the patio is finished all of the water will run off into this area along the line of the Gabions.

So the idea is to dig a hole about 20cm or more deeper and fill it with small stones. (Below).

Then a smaller gabion made of much smaller mesh 2" is formed into long gabions...

These will be filled with loose bits of broken up concrete paving slab like the one seen here that are coming out of the existing patio area. These will then fill the cavity. These gabions be wrapped in Terram Geotextile fabric so that the rain water can drain through the gabions, but wont allow any ingress from dirt or leaves which eventually would clog it up and effect the drainage capabilities. 

The images below are approximations using black fabric and testing the feasibility of using the larger cobbles that I've got left over and small stones. I think I'll have to buy smaller cobbles that Wickes sell and use them as they'll match the colour or perhaps some other form of stone, possibly even a slate grey type to match or maybe even contrast against the light grey slabs? 

These look good as a contrasting option and they're a good price £5.00 for a 20KG from Argos. Click on the image to go to the website.

Wednesday 7/7/21 - Called a skip hire company today with a view to having the skip parked in the parking layby at the back of the house. This is a lot more problematic than I'd have expected. (1) The price initially seemed okay £180. (2). It was going to take 12 days to sort as I needed a permit despite being in a parking bay. (3) The permit was another £60! So a grabber lorry is by far the best method. 

Thursday 8/7/21 - Dry day again today and last day at work for some weeks now, so should be able to crack on with the patio area soon. Tonight made a start on digging out the dirt in readiness for putting the MOT down. I'm still not sure about the damp course and what the deal is there with the proximity with the slabs. At the moment I've gone low on the house side, so will need to go lower on the gabion side, so potentially a lot of dirt. The image here resulted in about 20 -25 buckets and I'm gradually getting the stone out and sifting the dirt from them to potentially put back in with the MOT?

Friday 9/7/21 - Joe's birthday today, so didn't get out that much to do the garden. Manage to get several buckets dug out and sieved a load of stones from the main area. Also started to dig more of the drainage gully against the gabions, but that was done last thing, so the photos' don't really reflect how far I've managed to get today. 

The main news though is I've managed to score a wheel barrow and a cement mixer for free from a friend, I just need to drive up to Hertford to collect it. 

Saturday 11/07/21 Nothing today as I've played cricket and it's been raining again. What I will show you though is - Ecobricks in use. Ben and I have been doing this for some months now and we've managed to make about 7 bricks. A quick outline of what an Ecobrick is - You don't throw away your soft plastics, generally plastic recycling of this type is non existent and it'll either end up in the Ocean or being burned in some 3rd world country in a beautiful pristine environment. So you have a few options. The best one is don't buy products in plastic wrapping which isn't that easy and another is Ecobricks. An Ecobrick is a plastic bottle stuffed/rammed with soft plastics that have been cut up. Typically a 1.5 litre box takes about 2 - 3 pink sacks (large bin size) worth of soft plastic. There are rules e.g. there's a minimal weight for each size bottle. Once you've filled one up you register it with the Ecobrick people and then use it, making sure it doesn't go back into the 'Recycling' system because that's a load of BS. Admittedly in the UK at the moment there are not a lot of things you can do with your Ecobricks, but we could have used them in the gabions at any point, but we've ended up using them in the steps...

Sunday Phase 4 begins in earnest. 12/7/21

I've been kind of dabbling with ideas about what I'm going to do next and how to do it, but today I committed to a plan. The lower side is going to be dug to a depth of 4 bricks below the damp-proof line and the upper side 3 bricks below. I'm going to work on it a yard at a time and see how long that takes and how much earth comes out. The first yard took about 20 + buckets and about an hour or so to dig, so realistically I can get two a day done easily by my reckoning.

In the afternoon I drove over to Andrew and Jackie Benson's gaff and borrowed their cement mixer, wheel barrow and a shovel, so it really is all systems go and using the wheel barrow compared to working with a bucket at a time is so much easier, but that's obvious and it should mean now I'll make good progress if the weather holds out. It's rained tonight and the forecast is for rain all day tomorrow which is crap. I'll have to see how it goes.