Since I moved in 15yrs ago I have been living in denial of the small crack slowly growing into a HUGE crack down my garage workshop wall. I know a bit about general building & the thought & cost of demolishing it & re-building on a more solid foundation has been nawing away at me for some time.

It's never going to fix itself is it? So I just screwed an 8'X4' ply board over it & called it a tool rack

I've had builders look at it over the years, some say do it on insurance & some say "don't ever mention subsidence to your insurance co'", which makes a lot of sense, and prices have been mentioned in the £10-£15k range.

Last Sun lunch, I just happened to be telling my tale of woe to the lads down t'pub when one old chap slammed his pint down & said "thas not got subsidence, I knows cos I built t'damn thing & now'ts moved round ere since blitz.

So he popped round yesterday & I could've hugged him. Rather than the foundations sinking down they're actually bulging out. He spotted it instantly, apparently the concrete slab was laid to take the weight of a car spread across 4 wheels & NOT a 1.5t lathe + 1t milling machine up by the back wall

He reckons that the weight concentrated at one end + any vibration over the years has slowly compacted the aggregate under the slab & pushed the foundation out just enough to cause the crack. Simply cut out half the slab, sort out the aggregate & re-lay a thicker slab at that end.

Phew, saved me £10k at least

Amazingly the slab itself hasn't cracked, which is a testament to it's strength. I'd never noticed it before because none of it is very visible but the floor at the rear end is a good half a brick lower than when it was laid.

The slab was laid inside 6 course of bricks laid on top of the poured concrete foundation. At the rear of the garage It simply floats on top of the aggregate that was back filled into the foundation. The chap pointed out that the back fill is deeper than it should be because the garage is built to the entrance level at the front, making it 2' deep at the rear. Over time, the weight & vibration of the lathe & mill has caused the slab to compress the aggregate & there's nowhere for it to go except to bulge those 6 courses outwards.

We didn't, but he guarantees that when a test hole is dug at the rear we will see the 6 course of brickwork bulging out.

Once the backfill is redone with a little more compaction & the slab re-laid, he reckons cutting into the mortar horizontally along the back wall will see the crack close itself as the bricks are relieved of the pressure. Or something along those lines, all I heard was the £cost difference between that & demolishing then re-building.

Asbestos was deadly from the very first moment it was discovered, just like radium & countless other substances.

How we deal with the knowledge is what judges us. How did we deal with the knowledge that this ground breaking substance that promised to revolutionise our lives, but actually served only to kill us all slowly?

I don't know & I can never understand how my garage / workshop subsidence turned from saving a few £1000quids into a discussion on asbestos, & now it includes radium too !

I'm told that talcum powder is the next BIG one . . . When they finally allow the whole story to break.

There is a substance, a drug if you like, that has caused countless hundreds of thousands of deaths, The origins of its introduction into mainstream society can be traced back to one man & one particular period in history, yet nobody ever talks about it in this way. You could say that this particular man was the biggest mass murderer that history has ever known. Bigger than Lenin, bigger than the Khmer Rouge & bigger even than capitalism itself.

You can spot its addicts from miles away. It kills all of its victims in the end, yet the cause of death is rarely attributed to it.

On average, every household in the western hemisphere has at least 1kg of this substance hidden away somewhere.

It is far more dangerous to our health than blue asbestos fibres blowing in the wind, pure heroin, fast motorcycles or even the hygeine standards of a fast food restaurants kitchen.

We feed this to our children.

99.99% of the population cannot comprehend just how harmfull this substance is.

I'll give you a clue, it isn't salt.