The foundations were the biggest unknown of the project when I first decided to take it on. I was confident about building the walls, roof, windows, and so on, but I'd never done foundations before.  I knew that there were two services running through the area - gas and water - and I knew that the the ground underneath was likely to be very rocky. Other parts of our land have rock just a few centimetres below the surface, forcing us to use raised flower beds and rockeries to grow anything, and it was highly likely that the ground under the new porch would be similar. I got a few groundworks people in to give some quotes for doing the work, and just to get their general impression of how hard the foundations might be to do, and the impression they all gave was that it could be really quite hard work, but until you started, you couldn't really know.

For a while I pondered whether to do the foundations myself, but in the end I decided that the unknowns for this part of the project were putting me off starting. I was better off paying someone to get this bit done, so I could get on with the work that I was confident with. To that end, I contracted Davis Groundworks to do the work. They quoted a comparable price to the other contractors, but they could start work within a week, which swung things in their favour.

After the first day's work, it was clear that the ground underneath wasn't too difficult to work with. As the photo on the right shows, it was compacted earth, with nothing in the way of rock at all. I guess that the house had been built on a terrace that had been infilled afterwards with soil and earth, and that the rock was either much lower down, or had been removed when the house foundations were being built. The Building Control surveyor came out, and after inspecting asked for the foundations to be dug out to 1 metre. The trench for strip foundations of 600mm width was dug out, and a slightly smaller pad created for the steps. A new drain was also to be installed. This was going to be put in on the uphill side of the porch, out of sight from the main entrance, but had to be connected to the existing sewer connection on the down-hill side. A trench for this marked out on the first day, but not dug out at that stage.

On the second day, the remainder of the drainage trench was cut out, and the drain and hopper laid in place. The concrete was delivered into the layby outside our house, which was the closest we could get it, and the wheel-barrowed up the drive.

The photo on the right shows the finished foundations. You can see the drainage pipe (or rather, the corrugated protection around the pipe) running right across the width of the site. There is a step in the foundations to account for the height difference. As I eventually found out when I started building the walls, the foundations on the lower step were built to exactly the right height for the lowest course of blocks to line up with the blockwork of the house. The step on the left of the phot is too high though, so I had to trim the lowest course of blocks down by about 5cm to get everything to fit together. This was a real pain, and I don't know how the groundworks messed this up.

So, in a matter of a couple of days, the project had started, and I had solid foundations on which I could start to build my walls!