This was the only major recommendation from the soil study that we had done. On the one hand it is tempting to be skeptical and think that the company responsible for the study will have felt some pressure to make some kind of recommendation - so maybe the 1m trench is not that important. On the other hand if it means the house is less likely to disappear then it's got to be a good thing. Right? I'm still not sure.
The study also had something to say about building close to the edge of a steep slope. This advice was difficult to interpret and was not mentioned in conversations I had with the study manager but seemed to suggest that we should leave a 4m meter gap between the house walls and the edge of the slope. While we have kept the house small so that there is as big a gap as possible, it is less than 4m in some places.
I tried to research this issue on the Internet without much success. In fact a book, structural foundations manual for low-rise buildings seems to suggest that the distance should be much greater. What can I say, we hope our small house will be ok.
In the background of this photo you can see our neighbors' house. My wife's sister, Alex, lives here with her husband Oren and daughter. The dogs are theirs!
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