Gripe of the day - What is yours?

[rowdy]

Just got home from work. Met the contractors this morning before I left, and searched for a reason for the collapse.
When I moved into the property, the previous tenant erected a terribly built utility room on the side of the house, as has been done with every house in the street. I immediately tore it down and re built it.
However, the previous tenant took the downpipe from the house and diverted it into a blue water butt (the kind used on building sites to fill with water to knock up with) that was just left to fill up and overflow with nowhere for the rain water to go.

When I rebuilt the utility room, I dug down to the footings of the house and built up a kind of French drain, creating a channel with engineering bricks and concreting inside the channel with a fall to the waste drain about a meter along the house and filling it with shingle thus creating a run off and somewhere for the rain water to go. The outside tap is above this and after running it for a period it appears that over time this has now failed and allowed the water to disperse into the ground.

Now, what neither I or the contractor can quite understand is how and where tue sheer amount of soil, a mixture of sandy loam, clay and such has disappeared to.
There are working sand pits still, around a mile ir so from my home. The property was built 100 years ago originally for workers that were building the local railway line so whether there was some historic mining for materials I don’t know. Maybe there is a fissure under the ground somewhere below the property, but to put in perspective quite how much ground has disappeared, the contractor has ordered 17 bulk bags of shingle and type 1 mot! Which to me seems excessive for rain water run off from the narrow end of the house (pitched barn end, approx 4m length of gutter.

[redtrummy]

Thanks Rowdy. Hope it's all successful. Could well be old mine workings involved somewhere along the line

[Bibio]

Bloody hell Rowdy thats some serious hole. Hope its sorted soon.

[rowdy]

Contractors have done a great job and done so quickly, have rebuilt the concrete pad under the extension and jacked it up and packed it with slate, I would think the corner of it dropped about an inch as it put the French doors out of alignment but all ok now.

It took over 13 ton of shingle and around 2 and a half ton of type 1, but they ran out and need another bulk bag to finish off next week. There were two old pipes that were broken that were going in to the sink hole, but looks like they were redundant. However, it dawned on me that several years ago I got a massive water bill about £700 on top of the monthly direct debit I had been paying, so contacted the water company. It turned out I had been paying for a meter reading from a meter that was about 50cm away from my actual meter that was hidden under a hedge.
It seemed that the meter that wasn’t mine had been flowing somewhere in my back garden and was an old meter disconnected to anything but still leaking water. I am starting to think that this is the probable likely cause of the problem, and the amount of rain following the dryish summer is what has caused it all to collapse.

[redtrummy]

Great to know that it all looks positive now Rowdy, and a possible explanation to the cause. Water in or out can cause a lot of damage