Day 4 - The sun has got his hat on...well, not quite

So, after a night of torrential rain, we avoided having the trenches filled with too much rainwater and so the excavation continued.

No hidden treasure or remains of past British monarchs

As I mentioned in my previous post, the day was going to be slow in terms of progress as there was so much concrete to cut away, dig up and remove, but once Callum and Steve (a.k.a. Bess) got into their stride (and many cups of tea and coffee later) we had a finished product.

Cutting away concrete channel to allow for excavation

Regarding the design issue of the drainage, it seems that this will have a knock-on effect on the design of the floor joists above the garage as the soil stack needs to be located internally now. This in itself wouldn't be too big a deal but because the soil stack branch (where the toilet, bath and basin waste connect into) has to be lower than the level of the pipes that feed into it, it means that it would be right in the space where the floor joists would be. As a result, the floor joists would need to run north-south as opposed to east-west which means that the calculations for the steel beams upon which the floor joists are laid, need to be looked at again to make sure the flitch beam I talked about would be sufficient to bear the load. So this means getting the Structural engineer to get his calculator out, do a few sums and charge us £300 for the outcome. More money :-(

Anyway, I'm waiting for our architect to get back to me to see if she has any design ideas that could avert all of the above, hopefully sooner rather than later.

The finished product

Tomorrow they'll be digging out the ground for the front porch, pouring concrete for the footings to the side extension and then pulling up the existing concrete floor of the garage to make way for the new concrete slab.

Hopefully no more rain either...please.