It is now May 2019, one year after we completed the land purchase on Randles Road for our first ever self storage site. So what has changed?
When we first bought the land, it was essentially an empty field in the middle of Knowsley Business Park. 2 acres of long grass, mud, rubbish, weeds, brambles and trees, never built on before. No water supply, no electricity, no internet, no nothing! It would take an age to walk from one end of the site to the other negotiating all the plant themed obstacles. And if you tried to run through it, you could easily make a fool of yourself (as John discovered – ha ha).
After protecting the site from potential unwanted invaders, the first job that needed to be done before any groundworks was to get rid of the trees that took up the space of 100 storage containers. Don’t worry, they were not ancient redwoods or anything beautiful like that, they were basically overgrown weeds in a big mass of mess!
As part of our planning conditions, we were not allowed to remove the trees until October. But luckily, we had an underground drainage system to design and a groundworks contractor to decide on before we could start work so it all ended up being timed nicely with work starting on the 1st October 2018.
We were very impressed with EA Formby who removed the trees for us. For 5 days there were two lads with chainsaws making their way through the trees. They were then followed by a mulcher that drove over the felled trees and turned them into mulch. It was a scary machine – you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of one that’s for sure!
Once the trees were gone you could really appreciate the size of the site – huge!
As soon as the trees were dust, the site strip could begin. It was amazing coming up every day and seeing massive areas of the site turn from lumpy messy green to smooth orangey brown soil!
Once the site was stripped, levelled off and stoned up the drainage project began. We worked out that we would need a proper surface water drainage system in place with it being such a big site and not very quick draining soil. This was the longest part of the project, and the most frustrating for us when we came up every day and nothing looked different, but a lot was going on underground! It started working very quickly though and gradually when we would visit after rain we could tell that the puddles were smaller and it was all drying out really quickly. Excellent!
10 manhole constructions, miles of pipe, piles of stone, huge tanks, tonnes of digging and 4 months later, the drainage was done and it was all plain sailing from there.
In January, we got our electricity connection, in February we got our automatic gate and first strip of concrete, in March we got our fencing, in April we got our building foundations, electric cables, lamp posts, internet, driveway and electric meter and so far in May we have our third section of concrete and the island around the building!
So what is left to do before we are ready to open?
We are nearly there! The concreting is well underway now and should be finished by the end of May. The only thing that is holding the job up now is the office building which we are waiting to be signed off by the council. All being well, the building should be started by the end of May. It is only a little office so as long as we have some efficient builders it should be up in a few weeks! That’ll be when everything else including the security system, containers and our office set up can come together to allow us to finally open our brand new storage site!
Be patient everyone – Tortoise Storage will win the race – slowly and steadily!
Thanks for reading!
Tortoise Storage