New septic tank installation - Part 2

The continuation of Part 1 which is the previous post here.

The last two days!

The green lidded thing is the pump to pump the water uphill to the sand filter bed.
Can you see where that pipe for the toilet waste is going?

More trenches, although my OH had been filling in and
laying turf back over the trenches further uphill over the weekend.

Yup, the toilet waste pipe went right under my planter with Gertrude Jekyll the rose in it!

Looking out of my office window at a nice truckful of gravel.

The last morning before David arrived, there was still a lot to do.

The two piles of soil were the best he could get from a quarry as we didn't have enough,
however the quality was atrocious as it was so full of stones and lumps of hard clay.

I had to add this one because I just noticed the other two cats in it!
Hallie is the black one and Bertie the one who is legging it!

I didn't take many pics as it was all about filling in after connecting the pump up to
the electricity, and then sorting out my rainwater pipe to be diverted to the old tank.

Trying to connect the rainwater pipes deserves a mention because of what we discovered! Running a hose into the inspection trap where all the rain from the front of the house comes into before exiting down the pipe to the soakaway only got water going partway along the new pipe. After a while it was discovered that neither the pipe coming from the downpipe from the other side of the roof, nor the pipe to take the rainwater away, had been sealed in. They had big gaps around them. Meaning that for the last 19 years since the previous owners renovated this place, all the rainwater from the entire downpipes around the house had just been soaking into the ground beside the house! Which probably explains why our coat cupboard right by the downpipe at the front of the house is always damp and in the past turned some of our jackets mouldy, until we left the door wide open permanently, so all I can say is thank goodness for free draining soil! So my OH has cemented it all in (all three inspection traps were like this. Bloody cowboy builders!) and it now works. Now we just need some rain!

And so the work was completed at 11pm last Wednesday - thankfully it is daylight here until gone 10pm in summer. 

And afterwards. The next day we set to trying to rake up the worst of the stones, which was a job and a half, given that our soil is stony, but the bought in soil from the quarry was half stone and lumps of solid clay! Somehow we have to also try to define what is gravel driveway and what is lawn.....

You can't really see in any of my photos quite how mounded our new mound is,
it does look quite ridiculous in our sloping lawn and will be hell to mow.

Nice rocks.

A lot of the rubble went to fill in the hole around the two inspection pipes for the toilet waste and the rainwater pipe to the old tank.

At least I have new gravel, although it probably won't be quite enough.

One good thing has come of all this, our toilets flush a lot better now that they are not going slightly uphill (yes really!) to the old septic tank!!!

Today or tomorrow David is bringing us a load of decent topsoil from his own land to finish off; this however will be dumped outside our gate on the grass so we will be barrowing 4 tons of soil up the steep slope of our drive.... so for the meantime the new gravel will not be spread until we are ready. And anyway, it is so dry and dusty here it's just not worth doing anything on a slope until we have had enough decent rain to be able to bed it in. Which might not be until the autumn rains come, but at least we can do the flat bits here and there, because we are not busting a gut as there are enough jobs to do in a garden this size in summer!