The piles are in!

In Miramon, we’re used to planting things… but rarely black locust wooden posts 30 cm in diameter and 3 metres long! So last Friday, we really needed the help of two excavator operators, respectively equiped with a 14-tonne and 10-tonne excavator, to drive the 18 posts – which Manon, Renée, Mayuan and I had carefully stripped of their bark beforehand – that will form the foundations of our house.

It was a tough start, and full of uncertainty. Indeed, during the groundworks two weeks earlier, we discovered that a single excavator wasn’t up to the task when we tested it with the first pile in the south-east corner of what will become our veranda (or, more pretentiously, our bioclimatic greenhouse): the pile had sunk by barely 50 cm – and we were aiming for 1.5 metres.

But on Friday, even as they pressed their buckets together in a graceful, mechanical, aerial ballet, the two excavators lifted themselves up, powerless, thwarted by the pebbles in the Miramon soil... despite the watering of the ground, which we had carried out the day before to loosen it up a little during this heatwave. Then our excavator operator, renowned in the region for his skill, tried to drive a sort of metal frame—welded for the occasion and placed at the end of the pile—into the ground with his hydraulic breaker. But the frame didn’t last more than a few minutes under the enormous pressure.

Finally, the pile driver had the idea to use the elbow of the 2-tonne hydraulic breaker to drive the piles in, one by one, as if with a giant sledgehammer. And finally, they started to go down! We heaved a collective sigh of relief.

With this sort of method, it’s hard to guarantee millimetre-perfect alignment – especially as the piles themselves aren’t exactly straight. But overall, we’re happy with the result. All that’s left is to start building the wooden decking on top!

A big shout out to Éric for joining us with his eagle eye – both to check the alignment and to take some souvenir photos.