House Project - First Digging

We hire a digger and bobcat and start the excavations! Digger is a real breeze to operate. Too many years with flight sims and joysticks.

First stage is to remove the soil pushing against the dodgey conservatory. This was one of the reasons the conservatory was moving down the hill as it was being pushed by the soil every time it rained.

Nothing hard there. Just paint a line and dig it up.

Then, its on to tackle the side retaining that is ready to fall over. As its next to a neighbours driveway we could only remove enough soil to halt the wall falling over. Then the funs over and its out with the bobcat to clean up. Thats a fun little implement!










This left us with a huge pile of soil to try and cover over the back section. There was just so much of it! Note for anybody thinking of doing anything like this. Soil 'fluffs up' quite considerably. Expect a large mountain afterwards!

The house project

Its been going for 3 years now and will it ever end. Originally brought the house as a 'do it uper' and had a nice small budget to do that. The project sort of grew and grew and complication after complication....


This is the house as it was when we first brought it back in 2004. 80's hardiplank house. 2 bedroom with a dodgey conservatory tacked onto the side which was falling down.

With a not so nicely placed skyline garage as they had closed in the downstairs part and the garage door was falling down. The house is down a driveway and the turning circle at the bottom meant it was very hard to go into garage forwards and reverse out again.

The Conservatory

This is the conservatory they had tacked on. You can't see it, but the left side is sinking down and was pulling the house down! The garage door no longer worked as not enough head room had been allowed for it. It didnt help that the conservatory had been built right next to dirt bank with no retaining or water protection!

The Side Retaining Wall

A retaining wall at the side of the house. They had dug out a bank to make room for a door to the laundry (no internal access downstairs) and propped up the wall with a few half rounds and sleepers. Would have been fine had they installed drainage and used some full rounds closer together! Still, because its next to a driveway the council would have complained... What didn't help was the water pipe going down neighbours driveway had been leaking for years.

The downstairs laundry

The worst part of the house! This is located inside next to that retaining wall and had been dug out under the house to make enough room for a laundry. It was totally stuffed! Every time it rained the laundry would flood, and behind the wall of the laundry was a disaster as can be seen. The bank had collapsed over the years due to no drainage around the top half of the house.







So we brought the thing at a cheap price and started the renovations.....