August Monthly Update
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A summary of Week 1:
August Week 1:
Technically this all started in the last couple of days of July, but for simplicity, we’ll keep it all together here. Monday of this week began with a very important visitor: cousin Dan. He is a great digger driver and complete with work boots and a “No farmers, no food” #backbritishfarming top, he made the trip from East Yorkshire to come help us with a set of projects. The only rule was that he absolutely had to be back in Yorkshire to lead wheat and help with harvest, which gave us roughly one week to get our bits done up here.
From here on out, cousin Dan will be called Little Dan, because our DanDan is older and taller, and therefore he is Big Dan. It’s been confusing!
Whilst awaiting all our machines, Big Dan and Little Dan tackled one thing that would be good to see gone - the giant trough in the Dairy. Starting manually with sledehammers and an SDS drill to break apart the joints, it transpired that it was in fact made of brick. That made it a bit quicker to dismantle, and Big Dan ended up with more bricks for his reclaimed brick collection too.
When the digger and pecker arrived on site, Little Dan did demolition of the concrete pads that footed the trough. Some of the shed floor was cast around parts of this, so there’s two sections that need some filling in but, at last, this trough is gone!
Of course, with the machines now here, the attention turned to the actual mission for the week. At the time of writing, we’re on the final bits but I’ll add these to this section tomorrow.
Let’s go back to the main farmhouse, where, if you remember from our roofing mission over a year ago, a potting shed aound the north side, at the end of a long slope of roof, simply had to go. The entire structure was rotten and it was compromising the house itself (it wasn’t tied in).
Then, for drains to go to the soak-away that we had popped in during January, the foundations and walls needed to go. These bits were left in a giant heap of stone and smashed concrete, and had become a lovely mound of rubble and weeds.
Mission 1 was to clear this mound. Armed with a skidsteer borrowed from a neighbouring farmer, a dumper and the digger, we all chipped in to get this mountain out of the way.
The ground here slopes steeply towards the house itself, and the access is narrow and tight. That meant a fair amount of clearing, flattening, building up, compressing, pushing and excavating over and over again.
Little Dan challenged himself for how large the rubble boulders could be on their way into the dumper. A solid 60:40 success rate of monsters made it into the removal vessels and the rest were either broken up or handballed out instead.
As you can see, Dumpers are not built for 5’4’’ people because I could barely reach the pedels even with the seat at its minimum options, but after a day and a half, the rubble mound was gone and we were onto Mission 2.
Mission 2 was to plan, source and commence the installation of a long-term-temporary french drain around this top most part of the farmhouse.
What we’re dealing with here… sharp hard rock preventing any digging!
That is no small feat, as the entire site is solid rock, there were some existing pipes and drains, and there was the problematic poop pipe to contend with here too. We were using this opportunity as our re-route Poop Pipe moment, because the existing one goes uphill after exiting the building. You can see why that’s not a good thing, I hope.
The plan on this back corner was to:
Uncover the drainage laid in January (ideally without complete demolition)
Uncover the poop pipe where it heads uphill, then comes back downhill
Remove the problematic poop pipe sections
Remove the outside toilets cast iron poop pipe connection
Trench around the house to at least 15cm below the internal floor height, which thankfully for us steps up as the house goes uphill
Trench down the driveway and past the porch area but somehow make the french drain pipe connect into January’s soak-away drainage.
The highest point of all of this would be at the top of the porch steps, so we’d lay one continuous perforated pipe with two outflows, one to that soakaway, and the other will be temporarily kicked out into the lower garden, where the soil drains well.
The specs of this drain, and all purchasing decisions, was down to me (Jess), so what you have here is a drain created by someone who has never done a drain before, but has researched as hard as possible and had advice from farmers for land drain knowledge. Little Dan has also assisted in construction and repairs of land drains on his farm, so we thought we’d be able to tackle it. Let’s go!
First, lets start with a visual of existing pipes. On the top left near the tools, you can see the poop chute exit the building and come into the ground before making an eventual 90 degree turn (two 45s) up hill. on the lower right, you can see the drainage from January, sat over a rocky ledge that we’d need to break through and under. Out of shot to the far right is the rest of the poop pipe when it swings back. Our new trench here will be the home to all pipes including the french drain right at the bottom.
The backfill up against the current kitchen gable in the house was mostly soil and loose rock. Well, it was soil for about 60cm, before the rock shelf rose up to about 2 inches below the surface. This was mostly blue rock, so we had to work around it rather than go through it. The end goal here will be to remove everything above internal floor level on the outside, but at the moment that would require a substantial retaining wall, so we’ll pick that up at a later date with more time.
Why more time? Because this is Tuesday. Next Monday scaffolding needs to be erected on this exact spot. Time is of the essence!
The entire trench needed a gradual fall, so working to the ground levels, rocky geography and existing pipes we needed to tap into wasn’t straightforward. Little Dan pecked through the worst of the areas in our path whilst giving the wall clearance where needed, and then re-dug the trench with the narrow bucket to leave us with a full trench.
Anything near pipes or very close to the building was dug by hand, by Big Dan mostly. The newly re-excavated January drain was shallower than we’d have liked, but with some careful pick axing, troweling, SDS drilling and shovelling, the rock was cleared and the path complete.
There were only two major set backs for this whole trenching mission. One was the the digger track pin thing snapped and the track fell off, which lost us half a day until both were replaced. The other was that the well water incoming pipe had a leak on a branch back to the field before a stop tap. That meant there was no way to stop the high pressure water coming half a kilometre downhill to do a pipe swap or change.
Enter neighbouring farmer Ben who knows our farm arguably better than we do. As the local water piping oracle, he was our first call for advice, partly to see if he know if there was a tap anywhere else and partly to see if he’d come and swap out the fixings because he’d keep a cool head in the water war. Although there was no other tap, Ben did offer to come switch the pipes, and that was amazing. Now that Big Dan has seen it in action, he might be more confident doing the switch himself in future!
That pipe, fully uncovered, shared a window to the past though, because it had an old cast iron connection down to the yard still in situ. This section of pipe is now repaired and simplified into one single straight. With that done, our drain work could continue:
First, the January Drains 45 to a Y, which Big Dan completed in fairly rapid time:
We did dry fit the pipe and check the fall, but I don’t have evidence of this moment sadly. Next was the membrane. From my research, advice and current level of experience, French drains (if they include a pipe), should be fully surrounded by a non-woven geotextile. This is to stop soil particles and manky bits blocking your stone gaps and bunging up the pipe holes too.
At the base of the trench, we then put a super thin layer of fine gravel (washed, always, and larger than your pipe holes of course!) to create a nice even and smooth bed for the pipe to sit on.
The geotextile and stone bed going in at the very shallowest end of the trench here ^^
Our stone ended up coming from a local quarry. I’d price checked with aggregate suppliers and found the quarry could deliver by truck load the next morning for about £500 less than the main stream building suppliers (like MKM, Travis Perkins etc). They helped finalise the stone selection and delivered a few tons of 10mm stone and a few more 20-40mm stone, all washed of course.
With the bed made all the way around, and levelled to create the necessary fall too, we then placed the pipe in. A bit tricky as it wanted to just bend up, so a few hard twists were needed before it sat quietly in the bottom of the trench.
Next, the pipe, now in its final resting place, was covered over with another thin layer of the fine gravel. That’s necessary for us here because some areas will get vehicle traffic, and smaller stone helps to protect the pipe a little more. I set the lads a 2cm/20mm depth for the topping for most areas, and a little more for the traffic lane.
Because of how tight the site is here, bucketing it in was the only option, so it took a little longer than we’d have liked, but eventually, she was covered.
That takes us to Saturday evening, where I stepped away and the boys continued. By the end of Saturday night, after dinner, the January Drainage was back connected in this far corner of the house. That was our first deadline met, because Saturday night/Sunday morning would see a fair volume of rain. Sunday morning rolled around and with about 2cm of rain, everything did it’s job perfectly.
The final connection to do was the new poop pipe which will, shortly, have a connection coming into it from upstairs for maximum poop chute velocity. The first step was to take away that double 45 that led the poop uphill and instead connect straight run from the house exit downhill (that’s the black pipe above).
Here is the situation downstream, at the connection to the underground septic tank run:
Dan did some cutting and used a flexible collar to step up to the new pipe, making sure the base of the pipe didn’t have any bumps to block the flow:
Then we tested it (not with human excrement, but with copious water) to check for any issues or leaks, and it ran through perfectly. All pipework was now complete, and the backfilling commenced.
Slow progress on the back side of the site because there was no access for machinery and the gutter drainage couldn’t sit lower, otherwise it would not connect with a fall around the back of the building.
Therefore, carefully bucketing stone was the only way. Big Dan took this with Little Dan filling at the stone piles near the cow shed.
The next step was to fold over the membrane. Best practice here is to staple the sides together but we held off and went with an overlap. This wasn’t as perfect as I’d have liked, but as this was my part to do, I did my best. Sometimes asking Big Dan for more filling, other times removing some to create a little more space. In the end though, the membrane was fully folded from end to end.
On top of this, a layer of washed stone went into most places where the height would allow. Little Dan and I tackled the driveway and relaid the orange rock, using the dumper to bed in the stone when the pipe had a good 2.5ft of cover.
Little Dan then switched out to pulling some of the sand and soil away from the farmhouse’s northern-most gable back onto the pipe bed, before jumping in the digger there to commence levelling out the path. That did involve sorting slabs, large stones and soil, so careful work for a while.
Big Dan jumped in the skid steer to scrape the driveway of all loose material. This area needs to settle but won’t be dressed for a fair while yet, so it doesn’t need to look good, just provide access and not weaken the porch wall. Ignore the weeds, it’s summer in South West Scotland so you’ll never be able to control them fully, and they are not a priority for us and that wall and rubble section won’t exist in the end anyway!
Unbeknownst to us, still working into the evening, the camera stopped capturing its timelapse. That means that there are some chunky gaps in progress on the gable end and around the side. I have some short clips but really, this photo sums it up at the 7:30pm when we downed tools and went to the pub:
Here you can see where the giant rubble pile was at the beginning of the week. All pipework is buried and bedded. The gravel to the back can be overfilled, but we’re waiting for the broken wall heads to be removed and the render to be set first. Although it looks like a total mess, this area is actually perfect.
It has two levels, the higher level forming a smooth and gentle track that bends round to the back garden, perfect for actually getting a mower down there! The lower section is a wide step, not a steep slope to the walls, and has the lowest point at the edge of the drainage trench, hopefully managing water flowing down in the future.
And then it rained. Week 1 of August, complete.