Foundations

Once I had decided on the cantilever design, I had started digging some foundation holes in the path I had dug, conveniently this path being about 6 foot from the wall was in right spot. The holes needed to be about 1 foot square and 2 foot deep. There are all sorts of tools for making this job easier and I had none of them. I dug 11 holes a meter apart at the far end, and a bit more than this at the near end. This was as ever totally over engineered, the closer spacing at the far end is intended to provide additional support should a summer house type structure ever be built there. As it is, we have had a gazebo and currently a greenhouse, but nothing permanent has really taken our fancy.

Those holes took a long time, with a spade, trowel and bare hands, next time I hire a decent tool for the job. You can get hole diggers from hire shops, though the usability of these things on a slope did concern me somewhat.

In the bottom of each hole I put a storage heater brick (any old rubble will do), God knows why I still had these heavy slabs, two house moves since I last had storage heaters, but sometimes when you are a bit of a hoarder things do actually come in handy.

So now was the time to concrete in the posts, since my concreting experience was limited, well no existent limited, it was time to draft in my then 76 year old Dad for some hard labour. Mixing sharp sand ballast and cement might not be rocket science, but I didn't want to miss a trick on the foundations. Here is a useful guide on concrete mixes. The first load of concrete was mixed, in a sound demonstration that a life time of gardening keeps you fit and healthy! and the first post concreted in. The post had first been cut to height by using a spirit level on a board balanced on the ledger board out towards the post, and the post itself was kept level using one of those simple but essential tools a post level.These cost just about nothing and make posts an awful lot easier to deal with.

One pole done 10 more to go. But the cantilever design does at least make this part of the build quite a casual exercise, pin point accuracy is not needed.

At this point the work attracts a bit more attention, is it a fence I'm building halfway up the hill?