The site has moved from being ‘interesting’ during the acquisition and design stage to ‘difficult’ as we have begun construction. One of the site’s features is that there is a 12m fall across it from the south-east corner to the north-west corner. The house design is meant to ‘flow’ down this slope (hopefully figuratively rather than literally) but this has involved building a number of retaining walls.
Two of these are only ~800mm-900mm high, but the main retaining wall, where the house changes from being two floors to just one, is a maximum of 3.2m high and extends well beyond the building itself to wrap around the rear. This is something of an engineering feat in block, steel and poured concrete and has taken a huge amount of time to get right . It’s been made even more difficult as the ground behind it has a tendancy to crumble in wet weather if cut as a steep face and so has needed to be revetted – the first attempt at the wall was badly damaged as a result of the ground collapsing in one of the many storms we had throughout the summer.
And then there’s the tanking… and making it impervious not only to water but also to radon … and the fact that we couldn’t start digging anything out above the main retaining wall until it was structurally sound and back-filled.
However the ‘Great Wall of Coverack’ was mostly completed bymid-July which then allowed the upper footings and slabs to be dug out and constructed. We have a sneaking suspicion that it is going to be there for quite some time!
(More photos can be seen in the ‘Groundwork & Slabs’ section of Photo Albums)
The start of the main retaining wall (version 1) – 21 May 2015
The back of the retaining wall – 23 June 2015
Backfilling the partially-tanked retaining wall – 8 July 2015
Looking up-site – 24 September 2015
The retaining wall – 25 September 2015