Approx cost for groundworks?

mel o

Would anyone have a ballpark cost for the following. Our new house will be approx 200m from the current road. The laneway to the house is now just a track and needs to be dug out a bit and have stones (can you tell I'm a total rookie by my lack of proper terminology) put in. We don't want a road because the lane that's there is just gorgeous and we don't want to 'modernise' it, iyswim, just to make what's there suitable for cars to go on. Part of the laneway near where the house is to go has rock underneath that needs to be leveled a bit. Also, there's rock under the ground where the foundations will be that have to be leveled for a raft foundation.

I know this is a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string question but could anyone give me an idea of very approx how much it will cost to make the road usable and level a space for the foundation. I know I'll be scoffed at for asking such a vague question but I just want to know are we talking 5k or 50k. I have NO idea!

We have our costings for the house from foundation up, approx cost for a well, ESB connection, contribution to the council, biocycle unit etc. This is the only unknown (so far!)

Miname

You've mentioned rock. Nobody can quote that without quoting high, I worked for a crowd years back that quoted what they thought was a serious price for a four day job of 80k. By the time they were finished the job they had lost twelve thousand , I know it's an extreme but ground works on rock can get expensive.

mel o

80k for a four day job??? That's 20k per day? Seriously, how can it possibly cost that much? I could buy the machine myself for that money.

You're scaring the pants off me now:(

mickdw

mel o wrote: »

80k for a four day job??? That's 20k per day? Seriously, how can it possibly cost that much? I could buy the machine myself for that money.

You're scaring the pants off me now:(

Get engineer to mark level to where rock needs to be removed for house. Get contractor to price the job including stoning the road as required.
Anything else is just guesswork and really it is difficult to say if it's going to be 1500 or 15000.

Miname

mel o wrote: »

80k for a four day job??? That's 20k per day? Seriously, how can it possibly cost that much? I could buy the machine myself for that money.

You're scaring the pants off me now:(

That was an example not the typical. You need an engineer but even still I'd say it will be an estimate not a quote that you'll get.

homewardbound11

You can probably guess estimate hardcore based on your 200m by 1 ft deep if you ground is solid . Probably 5 k or more . Digger hire per day 350 .
Somewhere around 7-10k total. But who knows till they have a look .

mel o

We have an engineer on the job but he won't even throw a figure at me because he says you don't know what you're dealing with with rock until you go at it. I just hate not knowing.

RexBanner

Was in (and still not fully finished) a similar, but slightly different situation - Essentially we had to put in a 150m long drive-way from the road to the house (green-field, starting from scratch), we knew that there was a lot of rock under the house. During the tendering process I meet some of the builders out on site and most of them said straight-out that they would be adding additional % to their price to cover the unknown around rock-breaking. Eventually we decided to pull all the ground-works from the tender/contract to get the prices down to a level we could handle (I was fortunate that I had a relation who was a former builder so could help with the ground-works).

So we got the rock-breaker in ourselves and he had about 3 weeks work digging out the road, foundations, ducts to gate for ESB/electric gates, location of septic tank and percolation area. We then got in a stone crusher to crush the stone that we'd dug-out of the foundations/septic tank to 4-inch down which we put back into the road and around the house (think we put in around 1000 ton of stone into road/around house). Also, hired equipment to put in the road (dumper/roller) etc.

All in we did the above for about 11k. The road is fine for the construction phase but will need to be blinded off with smaller stone for longer term use (eventually put in tar-and-chip...).

One thing to be aware of, I see you said you want to "level the space for foundations", we could not put any of the stone that we'd taken out from under the house back into the foundations because it wasn't certified. Instead we had to buy in CL804 from a quarry, and we had to get the builder to put this stone in and compact it (because the work had to be certified). It cost us about another 5k to bring the ground to a level where the builder took over the build.

Just our example, your scenario may be different...

mel o

That's really useful information, RexBanner, thanks. It sounds like a similar scenario to ours. What stage are you at now and how long do you reckon your build will be from start to finish? Our architect reckons a year from the first digger in the gate to to finished house.