About a month and half after we purchased the plot, first step of the construction started this week. First our builder hired a water boring team to find us a water supply. Then the excavation of plot started; using the land marking done during the soil testing phase.
Let’s discuss these one by one:
Water Boring
Our plot is in a society which you can call as “Less developed”. Water, gas infrastructure is installed but not functional yet. As soon as the population increases, we’ll get those resources. But for now, we have to find water, on our own.
The process of boring for water is quite straight-forward. Our contractor hired a guy who handles all the water boring projects in our society. He came with his team and machinery and started working. The process took about three days and we now have an ample supply of clean, drinkable water. Woah!
Fantastic, and what was the cost?
As our contract was Fixed Price/Turn Key, (Read more about that here) the cost of water boring was also included in the project. Our builder was doing the talking and HR management now. For the record, we found water about 170 ft deep. Cost of the water boring process was about Rs. 50,000 (PKR).
Plot Excavation
Excavation is necessary because we are going to build a raft. What is Raft? We’ll discuss it in the next post. For now just assume that we have to dig about 4 ft to build a foundation for our house. It supports the house structure during the earth quakes.
Based on soil contents, your raft may be deeper, or less deep. It all depends upon the soil report. Soil report will guide you exactly how deep you should dig to build the raft. You can read more about soil testing report here.
Our builder and his team brought an excavator on site as soon as the water supply was confirmed, . While the boring team was finishing up their work, the excavator started working. Within a few hours, it dug 4 ft into the soil and put in on the sides. Very neat and efficiently done.
Next step will be the Compaction and Raft building. More on that in the next update.
