Blenheim Grove video – Piling day

In the second video of our series chronicling the journey of our custom build development on Blenheim Grove in Peckham, we have broken ground and are starting to do the piling. It’s a loud and noisy operation!

Check back often as we will be posting videos of our progress throughout the build.

Video transcript:

Hi, I’m Gus Zogolovitch, and I run Unboxed
Homes. We are a custom build developer in London. Today we are here on the second part of the journey of Blenheim Grove. We’re here on Blenheim Grove itself, this is it. And we’re about to go and see what’s going on over there. Which is the beginning of the piling, which is the first bit of when you’re doing the foundations. So shall we go and have a quick look and see what’s going on?
OK, so here we are on the site itself, it’s a very exciting day for me. Normally a very exciting day for anyone who gets going after months and months and, actually, in our case years of trying. We’re finally here digging, and in the far corner you can see some piling.
So this is the site. It’s going to be for five houses, and we’re currently standing in the living room of the largest house. We’ve managed to do several things, because development is a bit like going on a rollercoaster in fog. You can’t really see that far ahead, and you get good news followed by bad news followed by good news followed by bad news. So this week, the good news is that we got the thumbs up from the GLA who have been funding our project to date, and they’ve had lots and lots of problems and dadada, I won’t bore you with all the details. But finally they said yes, you can have your money. Great! The bad news, yesterday we went through our neighbour’s water. So we got a phone call at about 5 o’clock in the evening going ‘My water’s not working’.
And of course, the poor guy had to wait until this morning before his water was back up and running because the plumber couldn’t get here, etc etc. Welcome to the world of development!
So what we’re looking at now is the piling rig. Basically what it is is something called pre-ordering. And what that means is they drill the first bit of hole and then later on they’re going to come along and start drilling out the earth and start pouring concrete and reinforcing rods down to a depth of somewhere between 10 and 15 metres below our feet. And that’s effectively going to be the first part
of the foundations of each of the houses along here. And what they do is they bash a bit, they drill a bit. It’s a noisy but quite fun operation.
So here we are in the site office, this is where all the important decisions are going to be made. We’re here for our first site meeting.
Hope you enjoyed this one and see you for the next time on our journey, where hopefully we’ll see a bit more stuff going on and maybe some more holes being dug. See you later.