11.05.2007

When we got to site Benji, our builder, had brought along Benny his partner and we discussed the project. He said (Benny) that it should take no longer than a week which was good news, but the bad news was the amount he was charging us, we simply couldn’t afford his services. After some haggling we settled on a lower figure but we decided it would be wise to talk to Hannah about this. Benji and Benny also helped us make an inventory of all the materials we would need to construct the chess board, which me and Kasia took to Cash Build to get a quotation. While at Cash Build we also ordered the materials required to make the foundations to be delivered first thing Monday morning. After this I realised two things; first, an understanding of how expensive it is to build even the simplest of structures and second, if we were going to build this chess board we had to start economising drastically.
After two days of digging we realised we were making slow progress because the soil was very rocky and hard and our target of having our foundations at a depth of approximately 700mm was still quite far. That’s when we made the decision, with consultation from Benji that we would reduce the number of courses and only dig to a depth of 500mm. This actually worked out well because it meant by the time we left this afternoon we had virtually completed digging our trenches!
Later in the afternoon we met with the German representatives for a workshop, they were a bit concerned with the lack of documentation, and felt that we should be including more…
We also got a chance to speak with Hannah and were quite surprised to find that Benji and Benny were charging us far more than the going rate for their services. Meaning we still have to negotiate a price with our builders on Monday!