Construction - Site Excavation
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Our Blank Canvas :)
This picture was taken in the spring just after we purchased the property.
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The First Cut
They say that the first cut is the deepest! In this case we still had a long way down to go after this first cut :-)
The excavator made light work of the cut. We had to go deeper than we originally planned in order to get the site level but this has given us a large flat area on the east and west faces of the house.
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Day 1
The excavator still hard at work in the kitchen - just where every good 'excavator' should be!
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Day 3
Our 'football field'! We ended up with a large area, in fact, even with the house positioned there was enough room to turn around an 18 wheel semi-trailer.
Tips and Tricks
- Have a Geotech report done and then talk to other people who have built in your area. Almost everyone in our estate had hit rock during excavation, so we decided to hire an excavator from the very beginning rather than using a frontloader. This saved time and therefore money when we then hit rock and had to use hammer equipment.
- We had a reasonable amount of rock that required hammering. Allow for this in your budget as it costs more and slows things down a bit.
- Make sure that the excavator driver makes the site level using a laser level or other equipment. Don't just go by eye alone. In the end we had a 130mm drop across the site. While this doesn't sound much, the high spot was at the garage end. This has meant an average of 2-3 extra courses of bricks on the other end of the house.
- If you cut a driveway (ours is 210 metre long) ensure that the excavator shapes the road to allow drainage. Again it looked fine to the eye but after the first rain it was very easy to see where the water sat.
- Don't flatten out all of your fill. We pushed all of ours over the side and now have to pull some of it back to backfill around the house and for the slab! Oh well, live and learn.