Taking a look

It's amazing how much of a difference putting a road into our block has made to my understanding of how our proposed house site might 'work'. I'm fine visualising things in three dimensions i.e. anticipating what rooms might look like from a house plan, but I'm not so good when I'm trying to understand what a digger is going to achieve in an afternoon. And boy, do they achieve a lot under John Lacey's capable directions. Admittedly Michael was the one who had to do all the site visits; I just carried on as usual and then Bam! I visited the block and there was a road, as if by magic, and the whole architectural 'logic' of the landscape is now clear to see.

We visited the block on Monday afternoon with John Lacey, Christian (architect), Dave O'Meara (engineer) and Ella (off sick from school but as both Michael and I needed to be at the meeting she had to come too...), to discuss what further earth-moving is necessary to achieve a 'pad' for the house that is workable as far as Christian's design requires it, structurally safe from an engineering point of view, and giving Michael and me as clients what we want. It's very hard to convey a visual impression of the huge cut into the hillside and the road leading up to it by photographs alone, even Michael's clever use of a programme to stitch together panoramic scenes, but here's my best effort:

This panorama is taken from the north-eastern end of the platform. looking south-west. The sea is out beyond the left-hand edge of the picture, and behind the house site, to the right of the picture is the hillside that blocks out the summer sun from the north. The original house plan was for this site, but it was a long, narrow design which would have extended from where I'm standing taking the picture out along the curve of the hillside for almost 80 metres! What is not apparent from the photograph is that the left-hand edge of the house 'pad' is constructed from soil that has been pushed down and outwards from the hillside. This means that approximately half of the depth of the pad, from the left-hand edge that you can see in the picture to half-way across the stretch of red earth, is compacted soil lying on top of what was once a slope. Only the right-hand part of the pad, stretching back into the hillside is actually grounded on rock. Therefore we will be building up to the centreline of the pad, so that the weight of the house is carried over the rocky part of the pad, with only decking and/or terrace lying on the compacted soil - for obvious reasons.

Another consideration is that there is a gully running through the pad, down the hillside. You can just about make out its course on the photograph: a dark line coming down the slope just to the left of that tree whose shadow is being cast across the rear of the pad. In order to cope with the gully we're going to divert the water course above the level of the house site and direct it around the far edge, but we won't be able to build over the gully; instead we may end up situating part of the building (the studio/office, for example) on the other side of the gully and linking it to the main house by a covered walkway. Christian will be thinking about drawing up plans #3 once we've had the finished pad surveyed in the next week or so, and I think we're looking at either a building that consists of two parts linked as described, or possibly one above the other, terraced up the slope.

Something we have established is that we cannot place a long, thin swimming pool across the front of the pad for the same reason that we can't build the house right up to the edge: without very expensive reinforcement work, the compacted soil won't take the weight of a pool filled with water, so instead we're looking to run a pool sideways in relation to the house, roughly where I'm standing to take the photograph.

It's all a bit difficult to envisage unless you've already seen the plans, you went to the meeting and you've stood on the site I suppose! But soon we'll be able to put up drawings for you to have a look at, and hopefully it will all become clearer... Now onto my next problem, which is how much it will all cost, closely followed by trying to 'size' a solar electricity system properly! No rest for the wicked.