Walls Going Up

On Wednesday 17th October the block workers started. There will be nearly 650 150mm blocks that will be laid on top of the concrete strip foundation. We had to wait for the concrete in the foundation to cure properly before we could start the block laying.

The 150mm blocks are laid in a solid pattern then we will start with the 100mm blocks. These will be laid with a 50mm gap between them. There will be approx 6500 100mm blocks used in building the house.

 The block layers laid two rows of blocks and went away so we could infill the house with aggregate and lay a concrete slab. The aggregate was compact in 200mm layers.

 After the aggretgate has reached a predetermined level a 50mm layer of sand was laid and this was also compacted, the sand was used to protect the Radon barrier from damage. The Radon barrier also acts as a damp proof membrane. The Radon barrier has to be taped down at all the open edges.

The Radon barrier.

 A steel mesh was laid on top of the base and this was then ready for concrete. We used 15m3 of concrete which was laid using the hired Telehoist.

The concrete slab took a little longer to lay then we planned!!!

On Thursday 25th October the block layers are back to start laying the 100mm blocks, the lintels and sills also arrived today. The roof trusses are also ordered they will arrive by 2nd November.

Block layers loading blocks on to the slab.

The Telehoist is a also a fork lift truck.!!

Ready for Blockwork

Lots of work has been done on site. All the excavations were done on the site by the 19th Sept.

All the Excavations for the House Done

Then we started on the front we cleared all the soil and put down some Terram then placed 10 loads of stone on top at a cost of about €3000!!

Scraping the soil off.

300mm of Stone laid on top of the Terram,

We than started putting stone on the driveway a further 14 loads of different types of stone a 150mm to 0mm for the bottom layer and a finer 25mm to 0mm for the top layer approx 450mm in total depth.

The Stone is 450mm deep cost €4200 approx.

More Stone with Terram Below

The utilities where next the conduit for the electric was installed from where the pole will be installed to the front of the house 100m in total.Then the telecom conduit and the water pipe all about 150m.
Warning tape has to be placed above them.

The Warning Tape above the Electric Conduit

 On Wed 26th Sept. we started digging out for the strip foundations no raft foundations needed due to the hard soil we found at this depth.

The First Bucket of the Foundation

All the foundations where completed in a day and some stone was placed in the bottom of the trenches. This was compacted and levelled for the steel reinforcement to be placed on.

Foundation is 1000mm wide X 500mm deep X 65m long

All the reinforcement was done my me and took me two twelve hour days tough work especially on the knees!!

The Steel is 16mm diameter 3 No in the bottom 2 No in the top

All steel fixing done by me!!

On Monday 1st October the concrete was ordered 19m3 or 40tons approx. The first load was unloaded using the concrete lorry's on board conveyor belt system very cool.

The Conveyor on the Concrete Truck

Great Reach on the Conveyor Belt

It took us from 2.00pm to 7.00pm to lay the concrete very tired after that.


The blocks and the new site container where delivered on Friday 5th October.

640 150mm Blocks. The rest will be 100mm

20ft Steel Container cost €1650.

Work Started at Last! ! !

Work on site started on Wed 5th Sept.

The first job was to move the ditch which flows past the front of the site this is because the original ditch will be covered by the new frontage. approx length 50m. 18m of the ditch which goes under the new entrance to the house and the right of way is piped the rest is an open ditch.

3x6m 450mm dia pipe.

New drain along road

Going into the plastic pipe

The next was to create the shape of the drive to the house which needs to be raised by about 1m near the road side entrance.

View from the road along the drive way 

Sweeping round to the house

Then we had to dig out the cutting out of the hill which will form the house, garage and front drive about 30m x 20m x 3.5m deep at the back and 1m deep at the front. All the soil will be moved using two dumper's a 9 ton and 6 ton. Photo of the 9 ton below.

View from the top of the site

9t Dumper

From the drive to the house and garage

About 1750 to 2000 tons of soil will be dug out and moved to form the drive way and sides on the pond also we will be rising the road height of the right of way by about 1m. All this will provide us with somewhere to put all of the soil.

Some more photo's giving an idea of the scale of the civils work and some problems on the way.

Me on my birthday

This how deep we have to go it's massive.

Dumper lost a tyre

Still going!!

And still going !

New frontage with temp fencing which will be widened to 6m from the centre of the road.

Some photo's taken from near the same place only a few days apart.

There is still a lot more soil to move, the area that will form the lawn, the terracing behind the house and all to works to form the peculation area are still to go ahead and all the banking that will form the pond.

We should finish the majority of the above works in a about two weeks. That will mean that all of the works will take about three weeks right on schedule !!!!

The good news so far is that we have found very hard soil at the bottom of the dig so that it should mean we will not be piling the foundations.

The foundation engineer will be coming next week to let us know if we can have a simple strip foundation or a raft. The price difference is substantial.   

Commencement Notice

The Commencement Notice went in yesterday 30th July.

We have had to send in revised drawings of the polishing filter showing new longitudinal and cross section through the filter detailing the existing and new ground levels and invert levels. This is all to do with our waste water system.

We have also sent in the Provisional BER.

We have asked for the 18th August as the commencement date.

Hope it all comes back OK from the council.

BER and ESB

The Provisional BER (Building Energy Rating) has been done on the house. Its is done to prove how energy efficient the house is. The rating is an A2 which is very good with yearly usage of 42.2 kW/m2. We hope to reduce this to below 35 kW/m2 when the BER is done on the completed house.

The ESB (Electric Supply Board)  have said that they will be able to get us the electricity supply that we need. The cost is €1807.00 which has been sent.

Full Planning Permission Received

We have received the Full Planning Permission letter from the council.

We now have to send them back the Commencement Notice which gives the council two weeks notice of when we want to start works on site.

The first thing we need to do is to make the access into the site and level out the area around the house for the piling rig to sit on.

We have asked 6 piling company's and 4 ground workers for prices.

We will be deciding very soon.

Site Insurance

Sorted out the All Risk Self Build site insurance with Frost Insurance. This will start on the 23rd July 2012 which is the provisional start date that we have.