I am knocking down my current garage to make way for a double story side extension on my house so need the workshop to house all my tools and junk.
(See https://www.diynot.com/diy/threads/1840-victorian-lodge-extension-east-yorkshire.546732/ )
Hired a digger and dumper for the day. £90 for both plus £20 delivery/collection plus fuel (to be determined tomorrow) so all in i reckon £120-130.
First time operating a mini digger. Used an old massey fergie back hoe and jcb teleporter when I worked on a farm 13 ish years ago. Totally different ball game. All you digger operators out there, RESPECT! How do you do it?
Had my dad on dumper and shovel duty. But it turns out later that he should have done the digging as he was a whizz when he graded/leveled out all the spoil he had dumped.
So the plan was to dig the area out 8 inch across the whole base, but drop the edges down a further 4 inch approx a foot wide to make a small raft like base.
Yeah that didn't go to plan. Its pretty un-even all over the place. Along whats going to be the back wall there is the required 4" drop, but as you work forward to the front wall the whole level drops the 4". I had a bit of a mare trying to keep the hole level. The ground slopes which didn't help and my fine tweaking of the bucket was a very poor. And the ground is pretty soft to so I could only really dig from the front edge where there is compact stone for the drive.
My dad did a brilliant job squaring up the side with his shovel, and getting things levelled out the best he could with the abomination I had dug. By the way may dad is pretty old school and the best grafter I have ever know. He was telling me that he used to dig that kind of area out in a day by hand, and has done much bigger areas over a weekend, barrowing all the soil away him self. But now hes getting on he's not built for that kind of work so was grateful for the machines.
The base its self was dug out at 5.6m x 3.8m. We used the 3x4x5 triangle method to square it up and measured diagonal to diagonal to check it was something like.
With the ground being wet like I mentioned, and digging the hole deeper than first planned - my calculated 5 tonne of stone has doubled to 10 tonne just to be on the safe side. I am expecting it to take a good bit of stone to firm the ground up before I can start really compacting. I will keep what i don't use for my extension project later on... IF there is any left over.
A few pictures to show what I want to achieve and whats gone on so far...
My daughter who's 2 later this month loves a bit of rough and tumble so was well at home sat in the digger with me. She did have ear defenders on but decided to take them off for the camera.
I'm going to order the stone this week. I say stone but have opted for the cheaper crushed brick. I can get it at £19+vat a tonne. It'll be reet... I hope...
