Day 6: Soakaway

When I come back at 2, I find that the builders have arrived sometime this morning and begun to dig the soakaway. There is quite a bit of scraping on the drive - as they tell me, they had to use the diger to pull the skip about in order to get the digger in. Unfortunate timing. And indeed the digger is a bit bigger than I was expecting - not a little bobcat thing but quite a hefty object. Doing this are SoBTB and someone who stays in the digger but who was probably Irish. Talking, SoBTB (was he Gavin? I think so) says that soakaways are usually 1m^3 but they tend to do them 1.5m^3, so there is a square hole that size, currently about 1' deep. Turf is to one side; topsoil piled carefully on a big sheet of plywood; and the subsoil is coming out: some in the skip. Gavin says it is a pity to throw it into the skip, so we find a place for it at the bottom of the garden. Its odd how a not-terribly-large looking hole in the garden generates a huge pile of soil when its outside; and then a not-very-deep layer when spread.

I go inside for lunch and leave them too it. Sitting on the sofa and looking out its clear that they have a time-and-motion problem: the digger can dig about 2-4 times as fast as SoBTB can carry it away. So the digger (which I assume is expensive...) spends a fair while sitting around waiting for him.

I leave to pick up the kids; by the time I'm back its past 4 and they are off. The hole is finished, and some of the rubble is in the hole, which is good recycling (did I mention that the outside wall came down today? Well it did). They have put some of the old doors on top of the hole - how useful, more recycling. It should stop the kids falling in. I show DE the hole; and the soil pile. D finds Sam to play with; they go off to play clay games. Argh, just as long as I don't have to touch them. D and Sam get into the hole so I can photo it, for scale. It comes up to their shoulders, so its a bit less than 1m deep to the top of the current layer of bricks.

Looking in the skip, there is now a fair amount of horrible clay in it from below the sub-soil I suppose.