6 April 2013

April 2013 The work begins!

So the work begins.............

Planning permission was received at the beginning of February 2013. The building regulations require that a poster be mounted on the entrance of the building site - giving the information on the dimensions, location and height of the building as well as planned use etc in case any neighbours wish to raise objections.  The poster was duly put up on the 7th of February and no work could therefore start before the 7th of April.

I spent the waiting period interviewing builders, plumbers, electricians, waste water people, heating experts etc.   Finally choosing Antoine Nalin (Ecostruction) as the builder as well as for the electricity, Jerome Andraud as the plumber and for the under-floor heating (who had worked very well on the old house for me) , Stephane Audibert as terracier for the digging/excavation work and Alex Cras to design the ecological water treatment system (reed beds). 

No unwanted letters from the Mairie with complaints from neighbours by the 7th of April - so on the 11th the Stephane started the digging work. The first stage was to cut in the new drive way down to the middle level and building site.  It looks a bit 'wide' but will be reduced after the building is finished and all the heavy machines no longer need to have access to the site.  The idea was to follow the lie of the land as much as we could and remove as few trees as possible too.

View from the road of the new drive branching off the old access.

The route had to use every centimetre of land to get the length to achieve the 6m drop from road level to the house with out it being too steep. The hardest part was a corner which will be too tight even for a car to go around without having to resort to a 2 point turn - and the lorries will have to go forwards onto the neighbour's land and reverse down the last slope. It all turned out to be easier than expected for the lorries as there wasn't room at the bottom to turn anyway!

 At the corner - on the neighbour's land had been some really unpleasant dog kennels made mainly from scrap materials. While Stephane had his bulldozer in we ripped it all out and used it as filler for the slope. (With the neighbours permission I hasten to add!).   This gave room for the lorries to go far enough forwards before reversing. 

The corner which had caused all the anxiety.

Only 2 big trees and a 2 small ones were sacrificed in the end. The Maple on the corner had to be lagged a bit to allow lorries to pass. I hope is will survive having its roots exposed !
Before adding the hardcore, Stephane dug the services trench and I  rolled in the piping and 'gainnes' - great team work!

The final part of the drive down.

View from the corner towards the chateau d'Ansouis

Once the scrap and rubbish had been cleared from the  neighbour's side - another serendipitous finding was that there was a super view of the Chateau d'Ansouis half a km away !  Doesn't show up quite as clearly on the photo - but it is pretty impressive. Now all I have to do is to lop off that blasted tree branch one dark night!







Once the access was in Stephane moved my fruit trees from the middle field to the top field and then came back a week later to dig the 'platform' 80cm deep (13m x13m) which generated some 100m3 of earth.  This was moved into the lower field, creating a flat zone for Antoine and his builders to store building materials. 












A few days later Stephane came back again to dig the foundations 40 cm deep into the platform. He did warn Antoine that it would be raining for a week from the next day. And it did!  The soil was almost pure clay in places and with springs rising just below the bamboos adding to the torrential rain a good part of the trenches collapsed.  The digger could no longer access to clear them so once we had dry enough weather it was a hand job for us to re-dig them. Heavy hard work to end April !