Catch-up Blog 10: Excavation, Trenching and Engineered Fill (Oct 2018)

The team at Aqualine Contractors had done a great job for us back in early 2017 getting the power, waste treatment, rainwater tank and spring water reticulation all in the ground. So, while we did get competitive quotes for preparing the building platform for foundations, their quote was good as usual, and we had no hesitation in giving them the job.

Aqualine priced both shingle (trucked up from town) and limestone (from a quarry close by to our building site) for the building site fill. We chose the local limestone option, even though it was tricker to work with the 80/40 mix as it packed down very hard and was difficult to trench/auger afterwards, it made sense for the total cost and for the environment as we were using locally sourced materials with less miles and fuel for the truck and also less wear and tear for the valley road from trucks shuttling up and down.

The first job was to establish a datum that Aqualine could work to for levelling the building site and MPT Concrete could use to setup their profiles and formwork for the concrete slab. Pat and Andrew set this up with a laser level and marked up the gate post at the top of the driveway, putting in one nail at the top of the engineered fill (ready for the final sand layer and then concrete slab) and another nail at the level of the finished floor.

The next step, which we were unprepared for, was to make a decision about where we would be putting the top soil and clay/rock from the excavation work.. as you can’t start digging holes if you have nowhere to put what you dig up.

We decided that the area above and behind the building site, our future vegetable garden site.. should be stripped of topsoil first, the rock and clay from levelling the three sites then used to level up this area, and then the top soil from each of the three sites placed in a mound on top of that - a new hill has been temporarily added to the Maraetotara skyline!

The guys from Aqualine made short work of cutting the sites, laying the drains to protect the building and caravan sites from stormwater run-off, filling the sites to level with limestone and for the caravan site topping it off with pea metal so we wouldn’t be tramping limestone dust and clay mud straight into our caravan. The power and water were also trenched from the builders temporary down the centre of the drive to the caravan and container sites and then finished off with taps, plugs, switches etc.. on posts at both sites. Bob sourced the electrical materials and also commissioned the power for us, a big thank you for doing this in amongst everything else you had going on at the time Bob.

Catch-up Blog 10: Excavation, Trenching and Engineered Fill (Oct 2018)

1281 Maraetotara Road, Maraetotara RD12,

Havelock North 4294, New Zealand