The Day the Earth Got Drilled

One of the men from the contractor showed up at nine on Monday morning with a team to do jiban chosa, or soil boring tests. Like I said, if the land isn't up to snuff, then we'll have to spend a lot of money to drive in supports, and that will definitely hurt the budget. So they did the boring in five different places, as close as possible to where the corners of the new place will be.

It's a simple system, which they called "Swedish Weight Sounding Test." They take the sharpened boring rod and push it into the ground, then start loading weights on it--up to 100kg--until even when they're screwing the drill the ground is hard enough to stop progress. For the first meter or two, the rod slid down just with the weights. Then they'd both have to start drilling to get it to go further, meanwhile taking notes at every 50cm or so.

The bore got down to 2.5 meters on the back side of the house, 3.5 on the front side. One of the problems could be unevenness, but they said this was probably not enough to matter. However, they did find a lot of clay layers, which meant that it had probably been hauled in 100 years or so ago, before the present building. They had to take the core samples and the figures from boring back to their company to crunch before we get the results either late this week or early next.

I asked the contractor what his feeling was, and he just said, "I think it will barely be okay." Which would be plenty okay for us.