Well tree is now well lopped, much to SWMBO'd dismay as now there is no foliage left. She wasn't/isn't happy, mainly because we can now see the flats at the end of the garden. But on the advice of 4 different tree companies, all who quoted the same price within £20, all the upper branches were dead wood or rotten and all the diseased foliage was on the outside only and there was a strong chance of branches coming down and destroying the fence or falling on someone... Basically it should have been cut back every two or three years, not 10! so now its a much smaller tree and there's no chance of branches falling on the workshop roof...

But it also means I can get on with digging foundations... so there's a microdigger and powered muck truck coming on Friday morning and the weekend should see the hole dug and a big pile of earth on the front drive.... I may have to shore up the back LH corner as it'll be 800mm - 1m deep there by the time I've leveled everything... I'm wondering if I should either build a retaining wall or simply design the concrete pour to provide some butressing in that corner, but still leave a channel between that and the main shed base... ideally the base should be 20-25mm proud of the ground level but thats not possible cos of the slope into that corner. So the plan is to make the hole 75mm bigger all round and after the concrete has set fill the gap between concrete and soil with 20mm gravel so that water run off the soil or off the concrete has a soak away. This should also deter roots from trying to grow back.

I'm hoping if I go down 300mm elsewhere it'll be clear of roots etc. If not I'll go down another 100mm. The centre will be 100mm ballast, 25mm sand, dpc, 75mm insulation and 100mm of concrete - 300mm deep.

So Friday will be using the digger to lift all the big roots and lop them off 100mm or so outside the base... then dig it out starting at the high point at the back. I made a simple clamp with a camera thread to mount my laser spirit level onto a tripod to use as a basic levelling measure. That should be good enough to +/- 1mm.

Still got to find a local source of rebar, either rods i can weave into a mat or ready woven matting... and got to get 21m x ~300mm of 18mm osb for shuttering and a load of 2x2 to stake the ground out and support the osb during the pour...