Hello there, we are at this time in the process of building a soil retaining wall around our large house extention(60x16 ft-2 story extention). with the bad weather this has been put off untill this weekend. We live in a very rural location in Herefordshire and have trebled the size of our cottage. The extention is at the mo walls, roof, doors, windows and concrete floor, the walls are bare block out and in. The extention area had to be dug out with a digger by myself as the land is on a slope-some 800 tons of soil had to be removed-a big job. We have this weekend dug out foundations for a soil retaining wall along the extention and along the drive-some 130 ft long. The bank behind the extention was sloped back very gently(3meters down to 1 meter over a length of 6 meters) . We have managed to mix and pour 8 tons of concrete by belle cement mixer today-this is only half way along so more work when we get more ballast and cement. The foundations are about 400 deep and 700 wide with a mix of 5 ballast to 1 cement. We live on very clay/stoney ground. Reguarding drainage, we are going to leave water weep holes every 2m on the first breeze block course with pea gravel pored upto 50cm above the slab, but do we need to put a land drainage pipe behind the wall also as there will be a land drain around the extention walls? As you can see this is a huge job and the amount of money spent so far is approaching 100k, mainly due to the roof trusses being oak. I can see another 20-50k being spent on rendering, plastering and all internal wiring, bedrooms, bathrooms etc.I am an Agricultural contractor/general builder and do this work at home in my spare time with some contractor help.
