Uncovered well digging foundations

Ganga

mi-key said:

That is really cool ! When I bought my house I completely dug over the garden while landscaping it and was hoping to find something interesting ( buried treasure hoard, roman mosaic, secret bunker etc... ). All I found were bricks and some old rusty cans !

I would definitely try and make a feature of it as its part of the history of the house

When i was working as a plant fitter i used to visit various building sites to repair construction equipment. Once on site i asked a gang of men excavating to put new sewer pipes in the ground if they ever find anything interesting , valuable, gold coins etc when digging ,they laughed and one man said in over 30 years they had found nothing

Eldi_Dos

@Belenus, @Ganga,  you have got to use technique to spin out a cushy job, why rush.

Slinky

This is the well we found. Right in the wrong place. Had to have a reinforced concrete beam to get over the top of it. Where the blue plastic is, we also uncovered the soakaway, hence hole further down the garden.

jolester

Thanks for all your comments everyone, have spoken to a company who specialises in them, given me all necessary info and they are designing a cage and walk on glass surface.

this is where it falls in relation to foundations 

ThisIsWeird

Excellent news.

And well away from the founds, so should be no issue.

Please keep us updated with your project - love to see how this turns out

mi-key

Ganga said:

mi-key said:

That is really cool ! When I bought my house I completely dug over the garden while landscaping it and was hoping to find something interesting ( buried treasure hoard, roman mosaic, secret bunker etc... ). All I found were bricks and some old rusty cans !

I would definitely try and make a feature of it as its part of the history of the house

When i was working as a plant fitter i used to visit various building sites to repair construction equipment. Once on site i asked a gang of men excavating to put new sewer pipes in the ground if they ever find anything interesting , valuable, gold coins etc when digging ,they laughed and one man said in over 30 years they had found nothing

Not far from me they were digging up a farm field to relocate a road, they found the remains of a roman villa with mosaic floors ( lots of roman history around this area ) 

Section62

ThisIsWeird said:

And well away from the founds, so should be no issue.

I doubt that.

Anything unusual within an approx 45 degree angle from the lowest point of the foundation would normally get the BCO and structural engineer twitchy.

If the well wall fails then the ground below the foundations could start collapsing into the well bottom, effectively undermining the foundations. Or as the tabloid headlines might put it "Huge sinkhole swallows house". The existing structure is possibly at greater risk than the extension.

The way forward is probably going to involve getting a survey done on the well, a structural engineer doing an assessment on the risk of failure and the impact this could have on both the extension and the main structure, and the BCO signing off whatever proposals the SE comes up with.

Keeping the well as a feature would be great, but it is likely to raise all kinds of questions the next time the property is sold, and potentially may have implications for building insurance, unless a SE or equivalent signs off that the risk of failure is negligible.

Eldi_Dos

jolester said:

Thanks for all your comments everyone, have spoken to a company who specialises in them, given me all necessary info and they are designing a cage and walk on glass surface.

this is where it falls in relation to foundations 

When I first saw photo I wondered if shaft was needing repointed, reading about them there can be situations where it is better for it to be porous to stop a build up of water outside the shaft and put pressure on the brickwork.

Although I doubt it will be the case in situation it would be something worth asking the company.

If they do need to do work down shaft it would be easier before walls go up as it would be more difficult to get safety tripod in place then.