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Muckaway soil removal.
What you dig out either has to be put somewhere else or sent away.
Muckaway, spoil, arisings, go away on lorries.
Lorries are governed by their total weight on the road.
A lorry with its own grab to load itself has less weight capacity remaining to carry soil than a lorry without a grab, because it is carrying the weight of the grab.
A lorry with its own grab is a more valuable lorry than one without.
If you use grab lorries you pay more money for each load that will also be smaller.
Spreading all the soil dug out for a basement around the garden and changing the landscaping seems to have cost just as much as sending the spoil away.
Plus, you have to wait. You cannot have your dumper sinking axle deep into your pristine lawn during wet weather.
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I remember one client telling me that, to save money, he got permission from the owner - and he went to the trouble to get planning permission - to put his spoil in a disused quarry very near by.
He could not find a local firm who would hire him a lorry and driver for a daily rate, instead of their taking his spoil to their usual tip for their usual rate.
He searched the internet and found a man who owned only his one lorry that he drove himself.
They agreed a daily rate including fuel and began digging.
Within an hour the driver realised he was saving the client a small fortune but he wasn't getting rich as well.
So he went on strike for more money.
They had a deal. The client wouldn't pay more but the driver wouldn't keep to the deal.
I remember supervising a basement on the edge of a huge area of land being developed for housing. My client had bought a parcel of land on the edge and got planning permission amended for his one-off much bigger detached house he was building for himself.
100m away was a huge heap of topsoil and while I was there an excavator arrived and it started loading lorries that took the topsoil away.
The excavator and the lorries had the same markings. They were the same firm.
On day one the excavator may have filled 20 lorries. On day two 10. On day three he might not have seen a lorry till after lunch.
My point is, don't think you could fill 10 lorries a day so you will be finished in 3 days.
No amount of shouting down the phone will get you more lorries.
If you phone other firms they won't take the work from their competitor.
The short story above demonstrates that if they have a bigger and more important customer than you, important because he has a lot of outstanding credit, barking down the phone, or if they can make a lot more money sending a lorry to Somerset to bring back a load of Mendip Hills Type 1, you go to the back of the queue that day.
They would even keep their own excavator waiting earning no money for hours on end.
Another experience I want to warn you about is agreeing a fixed figure for the excavation.
I am here to help you but most times I don't visit site till I supervise the first concrete pour.
Once, in Kington, the client agreed with a large excavation company the amount that needed removing and to what depth
That amounted to exactly 112 lorries.
They supplied the excavator, the lorries and a supervisor. After the 111th lorry left the transporter arrived. When the 112th lorry was filled the excavator climbed on to the transporter and was driven away.
The far sides of the excavation were fine. But the 112th lorry, and the excavator, left before the excavation was complete on the near side.
It was very expensive, relatively speaking, to get a small digger hired in, someone to drive it and grab lorries to take away another 5 loads.
You might not be able to get the better of a company with lots of lorries but you can avoid them getting the better of you. Hire your own machine and operator, monitor what is being dug, keep calling in and paying for lorries until you think it is complete.
The problem with coming to an agreement was partially that at some point in reaching the agreement, the specific gravity (weight per cubic metre) of the soil to be dug out was assumed or guessed at. They may have been close, but if the excavation company over-estimated slightly to avoid the lorries being over weight, they would have needed to add on a few more loads.
But perhaps the client was pressing them on their fixed price. Perhaps the client said it should be 112 I will pay for only 112. So they didn't build in any slack or flexibility.
And, being a big, busy excavation company, they planned to finish the day they did regardless because the excavator and operator would have been promised to start another job 7.30 in the morning.
Another time, at Wentworth, the client wanted a huge new house with a basement then a swimming pool in the bottom at the far end.
Against my advice for two reasons, he did a deal with the demolition guy to dig the hole before they left.
First, demolition operators are often unable to dig as well. Same machine but different skills.
Second, I thought it very unwise to dig it all at once. It should have been dug for the deeper part, the swimming pool, that should be constructed before the hole reshaped and completed for the basement.
The demolition guy had not allowed for doing half then coming back, so he was angry at my suggestion. I got booted off, basically. When I crept back a few months later and looked over the fence the whole basement was ringed with deep steel sheet piles that would have been put in with a rig. I presume the demolition guy started to dig and it all got unsafe.
You need to keep half an eye on the excavator and trucks to make sure they are being filled. That means up to weight, not up to the brim.
The first time I worked for an Irish company on a very large project, the boss told me to climb up some of the lorries before they left. He knew that if they could, they would half fill a lorry, the driver would go to breakfast and come back for a top up before going to the tip.
He would get two tickets and be paid twice. He slipped the excavator driver a bit of cash for his trouble. The boss knew it happened, it was one of his tricks when he started out.
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