Piles

About twenty years ago there was a bad outbreak of hemorrhoids in the house sale industry around here, with the house sellers managing to convince themselves and then us that if you spotted the most modest bit of cracking in a house then full scale underpinning was needed. People selling mortgages were well into it and if there was a crack you had no chance unless you got the underpinners in. I don't know if the surveyors at the sharp end of all this were taking bungs or had divided loyalties, but one did wonder. And apart from the up-front costs, often but not always claimed on one's house insurance, there were the ongoing costs in the form of more expensive and harder to get insurance. To this day some insurers won't touch houses with our postcode.

And now the hemorrhoids are back. One house, being built on the plot obtained by demolishing a nearby bungalow, is going in for an elaborate confection of concrete beams sitting on concrete piles. Another house, having decided to go in for what looked like a modest and ordinary wrap around extension, now finds it necessary to put that extension on no less than 11 nine metre deep piles and maybe there are some beams to come. Note that the house itself, which has been there for fifty years or so, sits on foundations which are maybe a meter deep.

This time around, the outbreak might have been triggered by the availability of small piling machines which can get in and around houses, with the machine being used in this second case being the size of a modest sit and ride lawnmower. The driver asserted that one could not drill such a pile by hand, but I think that just reflects the feebleness of today's youth.

I remember seeing house piles being drilled out by hand with a clay auger, more or less the same design as a cheap bit for a carpenter's brace, down to maybe two metres, and with extensions I don't see why such low tech. technology should not go a lot deeper.

I also remember actually drilling holes, perhaps more accurately punching holes, of 10 metres and more deep into the London clay under west London for the purposes of taking samples. OK, so the holes were only around five inches in diameter rather than twelve, but I dare say the punch could have been scaled up. It would have just taken a bit longer.

But I forbore boring the pile driver with these gems, reserving them for here.