I've just got off the phone with the building inspector, who will be coming to site tomorrow lunchtime to do the stage 2 and 3 inspections, which will pave the way for our ground floor slab to be poured possibly this week! Here's Emma using the plate compactor: I was glad to see the Honda GX120 engine on this machine wasnt as powerful as the GX160 I have on my generator. I did most of the compacting - Emma's arms couldnt handle the vibrations. It was a bit like mowing the lawn. During an earthquake.

Here's the finished sub-base. We didnt quite have enough sand to blind the whole lot, but what's left doesnt really need blinding because it's really smooth anyway. In fact quite a lot of it was like that - but what else were we supposed to do with 3/4 of a tonne of sand?! So we used it up.
Here's our inspection chamber. We tested (not scientifically) the flow of water from a watering can, and it flowed out the right end, which was nice.

So all that's left to do now is install the dpm over our beautifully smooth flat sub-base, some Flexcell board around the edges, and get another 20 tonnes of concrete in there!

One more quick thing - if you've posted a comment and it looks like I've ignored you, I havent - I literally didnt know that facility existed on this blog! It's only looking at a list of posts to edit one of them that I saw that some of the previous posts have '1 comment' written next to them.