We’ve just received the draft report from the geotech engineers, and, happily, the news is good.
They had dug 4 “trial pits” on the site – holes about 2m x 1m x 2m deep – looking at the nature of the soil, trying to find bedrock, and taking samples for testing (for compressibility etc) and analysis for contamination.
Their report, which runs to 12 pages, plus 20 more of tables and photographs – yes, photographs of holes in the ground (and I thought my photography was a bit odd!) – will confirm that the site had not previously housed an incontinent arsenic-and-cyanide processing oil refinery, and it’s not based on a mixture of clay and quicksand over a geological fault! So the house shouldn’t subside into a pit or poison us over the next ten years. Also, the requirements for the foundations should not be any more difficult than we’d expected.
There’s still some more box-ticking to do with NHBC, but we are inching, ever so slowly, towards actually starting to build something.