Weekend #1: The Plan and Day 1 Report

The Plan for the Weekend: Remove a 20cm layer of topsoil from the whole garden, dig deeper footings for the shed, and foundations for the planter walls. Level the ground as much as possible.


The Equipment Required: Mini Digger, Mini Dump Truck, Skip.

The Workers: Simon, Jimmy, Peter and Kim
The Support Team (on Tea, coffee, cake and bacon sarnie duty): Sarah, Jean and Caroline


The Set Up:

We're not having any lawn in the garden, mostly paving and paths, which means digging down to create footings, as when we build back up we have to be at an appropriate level against the house's damp proof course. There was a lot of soil to move, even though it's not a big garden, so we hired in some equipment - a digger and a dumper truck and a skip to put all the soil in. We were lucky enough to have help from both our sets of parents, and our friend Jimmy to lighten the load. Unfortunately I'm not able to help very much at the moment thanks to recent surgery, so I've been part of the support team this weekend.

There was some debate about what types of digger were available, but in the end we plumped for the smallest - designed to fit through doorways, to avoid having to take a fence down. Our digger and dumper were delivered on Friday afternoon and very kindly moved into the garden for me (as Simon was at work).

The planned skip delivery (to put all our soil in) however failed. The idea was to put the skip on our front garden, but as there are manhole covers, this wasn't possible. Instead we ended up buying builders bags, which we put on the front, which will be collected by a grabber truck on Monday morning.

We've been very lucky with the plant hire, as one of Simon's colleague's brother runs a plant hire company (http://www.contractorshire.co.uk), and they've been able to provide both the equipment we needed, and a lot of good advice (as well as a man to come and fix our dumper on Saturday evening when the track came off).

Progress Report Day 1:
What it looked like when we started:

That's not grass, but a field of weeds

Up bright and early on Saturday to start the digging. Simon set up a webcam overlooking the garden, to take a photo every 10 seconds with the plan to turn it into a video of the days (and other working days') progress. The day 1 video can be watched below.

Start of work was hampered by the dumper not starting due to the cold (-2 degrees at 9am), so initial digging was slowed as we had to use a wheelbarrow to cart the soil out of the garden. After a bit of head-scratching, googling, warming up the machine with a hair dryer and finally a phone call to our man in the know, we eventually got it started by jump starting from the digger (use of digger as battery supply in a flash of genius from Jimmy). Once the dumper got going the pace of work picked up considerably until it was stopped by lunch and slowed after by a corner of the garden with extremely frozen ground. The video at this point shows a lot of work, but little progress in terms of area. Once the frozen ground was cleared, the pace picks up again, until the track came off one one side of the dumper.

This lead again to a lot of head scratching, googling (my main task of the day, other than providing food and drink), and a call to our man in the know until another man in the know was dispatched to come and fix the machine for us (hooray!).

By this point the snow had begun to come down and it was pretty much dark, so that was it for the day and everyone retired to the house for home made lasagne and some well deserved beer and wine. Everyone was tucked up in bed before 21:30.
 What it looked like when we finished: 

Before Snow and Digger-fixer Man

The Video: Day 1