So its been a busy last few months! After appointing a local contractor to excavate the basement and construct the reinforced concrete slab and walls we finally started excavating on the 27/03/23. The basement is approx. 31m x 7m x3m deep so there was quite a lot of spoil to remove especially as there needed to be 1m working area around this and the sides had to be stepped for safety. Access onto the site is also very tight and made worse by the build of another house directly opposite the end of my drive starting at almost exactly the same time. Excavation took about three weeks; we left several hundred tons of spoil on site to backfill around the basement walls.
The next job was to install the under-slab drainage and sewer pump. As the only sewer we can connect to is some 7m higher than the bottom of the basement as sewage flows into a holding tank and is then pumped up to the public sewer. This meant digging a further 3m down to install the pump under basement slab along with all the foul drainage from toilets etc in the basement. The pump is encased in concrete to stop it floating/ bulging – this is not the easiest task to do as the depth of the concrete has to be restricted when being poured to stop the chamber collapsing in. A week after putting down sand blinding / shuttering or so later the base looked like this:
