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About this blog

Rebuild of a house on a hill. My wife describes it is a wedding cake!

 

The image here is the concept, yes I know solar gain....may grow vegetables :-)

 

Rear1.PNG

Entries in this blog

1 floor done

It's been a wile since the last blog entry and I didn't expect to have gone through yet another contractor by this stage but that's the way life goes!   We had some good progress with the basement floor walls going up and getting poured without a hitch. We moved on to the basement roof which is a terrace for the lower ground floor so was propped with acros (decided to buy 50 as can re-sell later). That also went well - aside from some issues identified by the structural engineer. Due t
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Still working our way up a hill

Not sure but I couldn't add any more images to the other blog post so this is a continuation.....   The interesting plot has 2 downhill aspects ? One is the main garden and the other is to the left/front of the house where we will have an elevated parking area - there is an earlier entry describing the build of the metal structure and helical piles etc. This pic is after the beam & block & rebar just before the concrete went in.   Back in the garden w finished the law
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Working our way up the hill

Seeing as we were going to be using the whole plot width and the overgrown garden would then be impossible to access (sensibly) with machinery we bit the bullet on a big clear-out. Getting our soakaway in also meant this was a good thing to tackle before the house so we've spent a few months of stripping things out so we could create the soakaway area, building a lot of gabion walls and laying artificial grass. Oh and we built a shed - a very fine shed indeed ?   The soakaway is deep u
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Driveway Progress

Following the screw pile install this week we had the steel framework installed. Lovely job. Only 1 issue where 1 beam which is below current ground level was blocked by a large concrete slab that we didn't expect - solution was to fit it about 50mm higher than the rest which will be fine if we cover in concrete.    Now that's in, we can order the beam and block. Just waiting on SE to confirm a slight change to that. So probably 2-3 weeks until the area is ready for storage etc but gre
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Piling Time

As our house is on a steep hill and limited space for materials etc up top, one of the first things after demolition is to build out the new driveway. This runs out across a slope and near some trees so the best option seemed to be screw piles. After much research and calculation (is it cheaper to manage the separate parts of this vs getting a contractor for the whole job) I went ahead this week. By having an excavator on-site with the ground workers (currently building garden walls etc) it save
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Down it came

After doing the usual services disconnect and CIL forms, stripping out various materials etc it was time to bring it down (... and back up  ) Amazingly that didn't take long house_down.mp4
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And... we're off - Demolition Time

Wow - time goes fast! I guess I'll say that again....and again!   We submitted the revised planning app - free as within a year - and that was approved with no comments. The revised design removed a couple of windows which has pleased the neighbours. Engineer co has been working with the architect so we have made a lot of progress in design terms while we did the planning app so had building regs design approval ahead of revised planning approval!   In prep for the demolition
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Just moving the house a few degrees & making holes

So we had planning approved and were feeling good about being able to link up our engineer &  architect to get started on the details....and then.... had a re-think. We started out planning a re-model and changed our minds as the compromises were too many and the costs were getting high so a rebuild (esp with VAT bonus) was making more sense. But, we didn't really go completely back to the drawing board - we should have. Post-planning we had a good look at the plot, house position and neighb
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Before...

So a few snaps from Google Earth of the before images - these may be the current images also for a few months. of course Google does mangle the views and the walls are straighter than they appear!  
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