A crap load of dirt

The block has a funny fall to it where the middle is lower than the front and back. It's next to a river so may have something to do with floods years and years ago. Neighbouring houses have the same issue. To comply with Penrith council's flood regulations, and so our house doesn't look like it's sitting in a hole, we had to bring the ground level up so that the house's finished floor level (FFL) was at least 0.5m above the natural ground level above the kerb.

Bringing the ground level higher meant importing about 300 tons of dirt to sit the slab on. Some might say this is a crap load of dirt. The fill that was brought on site consisted of mostly clay and a site scrape from a finished build complete with building waste including broken pipes etc. Like I said, literally a "crap" load of dirt. Our SS claims that some of the building waste was cleaned up, but I wasn't around when it was compacted so can't verify that. I'm still quite pissed off about the quality of the fill as it's nothing like the natural soil that is on site. Why did we bother having to pay for soil tests if the builder is going to dump any old low quality fill on our site?

Anyway, we let this one slide a bit because we were already broken from waiting so long for anything to happen with the build. I figure we'll cover most of the crappy clay fill with hard surfaces so hopefully it won't be a problem in the future.

You can see the difference in types of dirt:

In better light, check out the difference between our dark, rich soil at the bottom of the picture compared to what can only be described as piles of broken clay ashtrays brought on site:

Compacted to the right levels it looks OK in dry weather. In the rain, it's stickier than Rolf Harris at a Wiggles concert. Just looking at it the wrong way results in dirty shoes that are impossible to clean.

The compacted "crap" load:

This process took about three or four weeks to complete (mid-May to early-June).