Wageningen is the main agricultural university in the Netherlands.

What’s the reason for this blog?

Since you asked, let me try to explain…

My community garden, called ‘Vlijtigveld’ (meaning busy or diligent field), has a racist and not very smart management.  The name really says it all, almost in a comical way.  What’s an organic gardener like me doing trying to have a lazy no-dig garden, with mulch to control weeds, in a place where we’re all supposed to be working hard??

Anyway, for 4 years now I’ve been trying to ignore the fact the management doesn’t recognize any gardening technique that’s not heavily reliant on sprays or chemical fertilizers, or any gardener that doesn’t control weeds by killing them with chemical warfare or pulling them out one at a time.

I’ve also been trying to ignore the garden management as they walk around telling any one who’ll listen about how they don’t let in any more Turkish gardeners, or how 60% of the gardeners have to be Dutch or the foreigners will get voting rights.  It’s us against them, don’t you know!  In this time I’ve been pretending not to notice our perimeter security fence, designed with a weak side, meaning whenever there is a break-in and a garden is vandalized, it will almost certainly belong to a Muslim gardener.

Literally, all our gardens are assigned based on ethnic origin, and the layout of the complex is planned on this basis.  Because the management doesn’t want any of us teaming up against them, they avoid assigning friends adjacent gardens, and try to promote friction by assigning nearby gardens to people of conflicting ethnic origins.

Anyway, as we can all imagine, this isn’t working very well.  It’s not working because it’s as much comical as anything else.  The gardeners are all mostly getting along and becoming friends.  The management has mostly lost the respect of everyone, Dutch and foreign.  This has recently prompted a great deal of hostility from the management, gardeners are now frequently harassed by the management and often threatened with the loss of their gardens.  Our drinking water was recently cut off!  You’d think it was war.

So, I really don’t have the time or inclination to try to solve all the problems of our community gardens.  I have no desire to join the management and try to ‘fix it’ from within.  Other than a little passive aggressiveness, I’ve really been trying to keep my head down.

I want the other gardeners to get together and decide what kind of community gardens they want to have, work for it themselves, possibly with my help.  To that end, I decided to start a blog to provide the gardeners, as well as anyone else with an interest in Vlijtigveld more information.  As well as information it will have the views of myself, the sole American gardener.  I think mostly the blog will have a lot of detailed information about how the rules are constructed, and how Dutch law might provide some help.  I’ve exchanged some letters with the garden management, and I intend to publish these.  It’s probably not going to make a lot of sense to most readers, but if you’re interested you’re welcome!

Luck was with me when I went searching for a domain name for this new blog.  ‘Their’ domain name, vlijtigveld.nl was not in use and available for registration, so this blog is at http://vlijtigveld.nl  The management are not really Internet people, so it may be some time before they notice the existence of the blog…

The Warmonderhof is the place I buy most of my vegetables from at the local Farmers’ Market in Amsterdam, and a few weeks ago they had an open house day at their farm.  They’re about an hours drive from Amsterdam, and Steph and I decided to make the trip.

They’re actually much more than a farm.  They’re a school, and they issue a degree similar to what Americans would think of as a Junior College degree,  however it’s a 4-year program instead of 2.  It’s basically vocational training in a formal college setting.  The Dutch call this degree an MBO.  I think the program they have is pretty unique, and I’ve never heard of similar programs elsewhere although they may exist.

Basically they are a fully functioning Biodynamic and Organic farm, and their program includes everything from growing the food to selling it at the farmers market.  Not only do they make it a point to have every possible type of vegetable, but they have chickens, cows and bees.  Because what they grow is used for teaching classes, everything is nicely laid out and organized, and very presentable.  It made for a nice open house.

A lot of what they produce they don’t offer for sale, for example dairy or eggs, probably because they feel they can’t produce them in sufficient quantity or profitably.  It looked like they were offering their eggs to people locally via a CSA sort of scheme, but I’ve never seen them at their Amsterdam market.

They also aren’t afraid of buying produce from elsewhere, and I’ve occationally been told I was buying broccoli from Spain or whatever.  I guess you can’t avoid this completely, because not everything can be grown on a single farm in season.  It’s still a little annoying sometimes when you think you’re buying something local from a farmers’ market.

Interestingly enough, they even have an art gallery, and I guess art classes are part of their program.

Of course they had fields of vegetables to see, some of which were on offer for people who wanted to pick their own.

The theme of the day was ‘Family’, and there were lots of things for the kids to do.

I do actually have some misgivings about buying my vegetables here.  I’m buying from them now, because I go to the Wednesday market which is smaller than the main Saturday market, and the only other vegetable stand is really bad.

You might wonder what could be more perfect than so many vegetables grown locally, but the problem is they’re too perfect.

They are a school, with students who pay to go there and give free farm labor.  They also get funding directly from the Dutch government for this.  There’s no denying this amounts to a massive subsidy for their operation, and it makes it hard for other small farmers to compete with them.

They do sell their vegetables at what I would call a normal price, and it is possible to buy cheaper at other stands.  The main problem is they have everything, and it’s of exceptional quality.

I think they’re a bit sensitive to this problem.  They try to cooperate with other stands, and aren’t afraid to refer their customers to them if it’s appropriate.  They talk about competing stands as their colleagues, rather than their competition.  What do you do if you’re like them in that situation? It’s hard to know what the right thing to do is, but I do try to give my business to other vegetable stands when I can.

We had no fewer than three cement mixers in front of our house today.  Strangely enough, two were full of cement, and the other had the pump attached to it they used to pump the cement into our house.  Why they couldn’t just fill the truck with the pump full of cement too, and save the trouble of bringing an extra vehicle, I’m not sure.

The other thing I find curious is why, all over the world apparently, cement trucks always have to have silly slogans on them.  Translated, this one says something along the lines of ‘Concretely into cement’.  When I lived in the area around San Francisco some of the cement trucks used to say things like ‘Get a load of this!’  or ‘Find a need and fill it!’.  Is it just that working with cement means you have to have the sense of humor that goes along with it?

The tool above they used to pull large amounts of cement around the room, in order to get it level.  It was powered and vibrated, and could move a lot in one go.

Here it was coming in.

This tool had a flexible pipe on the end, was also powered and vibrated.  They used it to insert into places the concrete might not have flowed on it’s own, like the inkassing or the odd corner, in order to encourage the concrete to flow.

Finally, when they finished with everything else, they smoothed out the floor.  The picture above was taken from the same place the distance shots in this post were made.

This is what the contractor calls ‘The Braid’.  It’s concrete reinforcement steel or rebar as it’s often called, at least in the US.  It took five men nearly two days to complete the structure, and the picture above is after the first day.  You can see the special pieces here designed to fit into the inkassing.  You can also see the piles have been filled with concrete and also have steel reinforcements coming out of the tops.

Below is a picture of the same part of the wall, but from more of a distance.  This picture was also taken the second day after they finished.  You can see it’s been built up in layers and in many places, especially connecting the rows of piles, you can see extra reinforcing material was added to give strength in specific places.  This was all very carefully and mathematically planned by the construction engineer.

This last picture is almost the same as the previous, but you can see the extra lines of reinforcement a little better.

Tomorrow the concrete will be poured, and what’s called the construction floor will be made.  After this happens our house will have it’s new foundation and will finally be stabilized!  In total the construction floor will be about a foot or 30cm thick, and on top of that we’ll put a layer of insulation, floor heating and finally a finished tile floor.

Until now we’ve been enjoying walking around in the space with it’s high ceilings, and it’ll be a shame to lose the extra height to the thick floor.  We will actually gain about a foot (30cm) of height compared with what was there before, but to put the new floor in deeper than that would have been too expensive, because it would have meant working under the water table.

The other thing that’s critical about this stage of the project is that once the concrete is poured into the inkassing it can never be undone, so tomorrow when they pour the concrete it will be an irreversible step.

Hopefully you won’t notice any other changes, and everything should work as before.  As far as I’m aware, I haven’t broken any old links and it’s not necessary to update anything on your webpages or bookmarks.  Everything should just work as before, except you’ll see a new domain name in your browser.  We have no plans for deleting the old domain name or old links.

I hope the new domain will be easier to remember when typing the URL by hand, and it will seem more normal and intuitive.

We’ve had the old patnsteph.net domain for 15+ years now, and the Internet has changed a lot in that time.  In the beginning we imagined putting a lot of stuff online, and organizing it into subdirectories under that domain, for example pictures and the like.  We thought we’d be using the domain mostly for ourselves and friends, and we thought a personal blog might be part of that.  Never did we imagine Bifurcated Carrots taking off in the way it did, and building the network of wonderful people you’ve all become!

Anyway, times have changed, and it’s time to move this blog off onto it’s own domain.  If we’ve broken anything, please let us know.  Our email addresses are all unchanged for the time being.

This is a Dutch word to describe what they are now doing on the foundation work.  If I look up the word in an online dictionary, it says ‘recess’, but I don’t think that’s quite right.  Anyone have a better translation?

Anyway, in the picture above, you can see they have made some holes in bottom of the wall, 50cm every 50cm to be exact.  They will make these holes all the way around the house, and in each one put a jack like you see above.  In this way, half the house will be supported by means of a jack.

In foundation repairs jacks are always used.  This is because you somehow have to move the weight of the house from the old foundation to the new one, and jacks are always needed in some way.  I think the way they will do it with my house is a little unusual however.

What will happen is they will pour a new concrete floor and entomb the jacks, as well as fill the spaces in the walls.  The concrete floor will have a complex reinforcing structure, and will be supported by the piles that were driven earlier.  The new foundation will then be in place, and capable of supporting the house.

Over time, the old foundation will continue to degrade and sink, and in this way the weight will gradually be taken up by the new foundation.  The construction engineer mentioned he included in his calculations that the old foundation will continue to provide a degree of support for the house into the future.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about my house foundation, with all the excitement of the events in Brussels, I almost stopped paying attention.  They’ve just gotten to the exciting part!  They’re removing the contaminated ground under the house.

Since the house is built nearly at water level, they didn’t have to dig far before they reached water.  In the picture above you can see they inserted a measuring stick so they could monitor the water level with respect to the dirt.  Soon they are going to start running a pump to remove some of the water, so they can dig deeper.  Rain is forecast, so the water table might start rising too.

You can see the pipes sticking out of the ground are what they drove for the piles.  They aren’t yet filled with concrete, but that’s due to happen on Monday.

The smell is quite incredible.  Oily and very dirty smelling.  It’s classified by the city as very toxic waste (when compared to what they usually find under peoples houses in the city).  Mostly it’s heavy metals that are the problem; high levels of zinc, a bit of lead and mercury, and some other things.  The test showed traces of petroleum distillates.  It’s very dirty!

According to city records, until 1930 or so the house had a dirt floor.  What they found was 3 different concrete floors built on top of one another.

The house is 350 years old and and been sinking the whole time.  Literally, from one generation to the next, they’ve just been dumping their crap into the floor, letting it sink and building a new floor on top.

Here you can see the former load bearing wall I posted about before.  Now it’s a nice new steel beam.

Where the wall used to be are piles of bricks…

There’s an incredible diversity among the bricks.

The piles have all been driven, and the city has inspected them and given approval.  One pile went a little wrong, perhaps driven a little fast and too enthusiastically, but wasn’t deemed a serious problem.  Still to be done on the piles are to fill the hollow pipes with concrete.

In the meantime however, the empty pipes of the piles are the most stable thing in the house, so they are building the support structures needed for the load bearing wall removal on top of the pipes.  You can see on the bottom left of the picture below, a section of pipe sticking out of the floor.

The support structure above is built on 3 pile pipes, and is about a half meter off the floor.  On the right side of the picture, you can see a hole in the wall.  That part of the wall was in a particularly bad state, and basically fell apart as they were installing the support.  In front of the hole, you can see the pile of bricks that came from the hole.

The picture below was pretty much taken of the same angle, but of the ceiling.  You can see how the steel bars are supporting the ceiling.  This same sort of support was built along both sides of the load bearing wall.

Below is the support structure built used along the outer walls.

It’s really been a big undertaking to build this support structure!  It was built, then the contractor came along and decided it needed to be changed, then the construction engineer came along and decided it needed to be changed, then the contractor wanted to change it again.

Today the city came along to give their final approval to remove the wall.  The good news is they gave their approval, but the bad news is the support structure needs to be changed again and strengthened!  The city also wants a simple support installed on the front of the house.

It’s probably a little more interesting for the Europeans reading this, but the bricks in my house are very special.  They are the original ones used to build my house 350 years ago, and they were all handmade.  The guy doing the demolition work has been removing them one at a time, cleaning and stacking them.

The contractor tells me they are worth money!  At a yard sale they apparently go for €2-3 a piece.  I don’t know if I’ll pay back the cost of my foundation that way, but they are clearly an important part of the history of my house.

Now we have to see how many people actually read this page, follow the link and how much traffic I’ll actually get…

It’s been interesting to see how the relationship between bloggers and organizations like the RHS or media organizations has matured over time.  Of the two major media organizations in the UK, The Guardian has openly come out, embraced the world of blogs, regularly links to more well known blogs and in my opinion this makes the quality of what they offer much higher.  The BBC on the other hand pretends blogs don’t exist.  In the US it’s a similar story, with MSNBC linking to blogs sometimes, but most others like CNN ignoring the world of private blogs.

How can media organizations consider themselves legitimate, when they report on stories like the recent revolution in Egypt, identify blogs as a major part of this, then ignore and not link to them?  If they’re a major part of the news, we should be able to read them, with translating tool if necessary, and for this a link needs to be provided!  Finding the Egyptian blogs really took some searching.  What about blogs in the rest of the Middle East?  If they’re there, they shouldn’t be ignored.

Most news organization by now call their website a ‘blog’ or have a section of ‘blogs’, but they don’t have blogrolls, you have to register to leave a comment they don’t write about other blogs, they lack an informality in how they write or in some other way just don’t have one of the things most of us understand are important about a blog.  It’s become an important split in the world’s mainstream media.

The RHS

Back to the RHS, one of the best known UK gardening charities.  I’m pleased they’re reaching out to blogs, but at the same time there’s some dirty laundry to be aired.

While they have a very important history, in modern times they have not done a lot to promote agricultural biodiversity.  If you go to their online seed shop, you’ll find a difficult to search through selection of commercial seeds, with a few heirloom and heirloom sounding varieties mixed in.  Don’t buy seeds from their website, just because you see my picture there!  They are not the right people to buy seeds from.

I had a similar experience when I visited Wisley Gardens a few years ago during apple season.  I walked around in their apple orchards, with most of the apples rotting on the ground.  Then I walked into their tasting area, sampled pieces of apples and cider that were brought in from somewhere else, and mostly completely different varieties from what they had in their fields.  The same was true in the garden shop, which had commercial varieties of apple trees on sale but not many old varieties were visible or available.  They’re a good place to go and look at the trees in the field, but if you’re interested in growing old apple varieties, you should get your trees somewhere else.

In the same way the RHS or The Guardian hope to increase their customer base by making relations with blogs, I hope it’s possible for blogs to sometimes criticize and influence the commercial nature of these organizations.

The truth is I don’t really use either of these!  Not enough time or interest I guess.  This means I don’t have a good way of configuring or testing these buttons, because I don’t really know what they’re supposed to do.

Do they do what you expect when you press them?  Would you like them to work a different way?  Please let me know.

Steph who does use both Twitter and Facebook said especially with Facebook she wouldn’t particularly press any buttons she came across, not knowing for sure what it would do.  She says she would manually add things to her profile page she found interesting.  Do you feel the same way?

What about just the commercial nature of Facebook and Twitter, do you object to me having their buttons on my blog?  Do you feel the buttons clutter the posts too much?  I’m still debating these issues myself.

I like to keep my readers happy, so please let me know what you think!

Landscape is the new square!

I’m not going to give any details until it actually appears, not a big deal really, but I was asked to provide a ‘landscape’ picture of myself for Internet publication.  I’m not really used to landscape pictures.  I guess like everything else wide screen, it’s what’s trendy now.

Since the picture is so wide you can only be in so much of it.  It really puts you under pressure to make the rest of the picture worth looking at!

Anyway, they didn’t tell me it had to be an exclusive picture, and since I don’t often post pictures of myself I thought I would share it with all of you too…

It’s a little difficult to explain this in English when everything happened here in Dutch, and it’s hard to explain all the technicalities on a blog with an unrelated topic and not make it too boring for my regular readers.  If you want me to explain something in Dutch or you want any other specific information, don’t be afraid to contact me via the contact tab on the front page of this blog.

I’m sorry, this is a very long post.  Many of my regular readers will choose not to read it!

I’ve written about Duyts before.  They are a firm of what in English we might call building engineers.  In Dutch this is called a constructeur.  In other words, for my foundation repair, they are the ones who would make the basic design and do the mathematical calculations of the underlying support.  This is an impressively complex task, and while my foundation repair is under way and it could still change, right now these mathematical calculations are about 100 pages long.

In short, I asked for some quotes from different firms, and their quote was the lowest, so I choose them.  This was really a big mistake.  After two years of trying to work with them to make useful drawings and calculations, I finally concluded this was never going to happen.  I refused to pay them, they refused to do any more work, and I engaged another engineering firm which had to start over again from scratch.

Duyts then sued me for payment of the work they didn’t do, and won.  Amazingly the quality of the work was not a part of this legal procedure in the Netherlands, only the fact that I signed a quote and Duyts claimed that they completed the work.  As well as having to pay Duyts, my legal costs were significant, in a large part due to the technical complexities of the situation.  There’s little question Duyts understood this in advance and has certainly gone through this same thing with other clients.  Save yourself the trouble and avoid them!

Amsterdam Building Mafia

Anyone doing any work on their house in Amsterdam will certainly dread getting involved with a contractor here.  They are all a little bit criminal, and in many cases they work together as a cartel.  Firms like Duyts play an important part of this.

It starts with the general terms and conditions that all contractors use.  There are a number of building organizations that do things like lobby the government for laws and policies, and various organizations publish terms and conditions that are used by the different contractors and suppliers that put the consumer at a strong legal disadvantage.  Some consumer organizations also publish terms and conditions that more favor the consumers, but contractors all refuse to use these.

What this means, in effect, is all work orders start with the consumer signing a contact that says they will pay for everything, without limit, regardless of what goes wrong.  These terms and conditions often have clauses that for example require arbitration with very builder friendly organizations, as an alternative to regular lawsuits.  My current contractor mentioned he was expelled from one of these organizations for speaking out against a fellow contractor in an arbitration hearing.

Beyond the terms and conditions, the big way to rip off consumers are with encountering ‘unexpected’ problems.  Basically, you sign a work order describing the work that needs to be done, and there is a clause that says ‘excluding unexpected situations’.  This means, once your house is torn apart, the contractor can find something ‘unexpected’ that requires more work, and charge you whatever they want for it.  If you refuse to pay, then the work doesn’t get done and you are still liable for paying the full costs of the original quote.  By finding lots of ‘unexpected’ problems, they can demand quite large sums of money, and your costs can end up being multiples of what you originally thought they would be.

When there are more than one firm involved, for example an engineering firm like Duyts and a contractor, they can make ‘unexpected’ problems for one another, and push your costs higher and higher.  This is clearly what Duyts does.   When you consider the reason I picked Duyts was because they made the lowest original quote, as most people would probably do, you can see how honest firms get overlooked and firms like Duyts get richer and richer at the expense of their customers.

The obvious solution to all of this, especially in the age of the Internet, would be for people to communicate this kind of thing to others.  In part, it’s just not part of the culture here to do this.  I’m not completely sure why, but I’ll explain it a bit in the next section below.  This is of course the main reason for this post.  I hope others will share this kind of information too.

The Racist Element

Part of how this all works has it’s underlying cause in racism.  Something that’s often hard for people from countries like America to understand, is the sense of being an outsider here.  For a long time people in this part of Europe mated with one another, and the genepool here is really quite small.  To some degree, Dutch people know one another on sight, based on appearance.  The way you speak is also important, as few people learn Dutch as a second language and speak it without an accent, most people find it very difficult to learn Dutch and many just never succeed.

Because it’s possible to so easily tell native Dutch from outsiders, this makes it possible for Dutch people to work together against outsiders if they choose to.  It’s what makes it possible to have political parties that oppose the presence of foreigners.  It’s something that just can’t happen in modern America, because everyone is from somewhere else originally anyway!  Most Dutch people are not racist, but society here often works in a way where they have to play along.  Sometimes Holland is compared with Japan in this way.

Anyway, most Dutch people will emphasize working and associating with other Dutch people.  These are the ones who speak the same language which they are most comfortable with, but also associating a lot with ‘foreigners’ can often draw criticism from others and lead to being excluded from social circles themselves.  In short, associating with foreigners can just cause problems or harassment, and in general it’s better not to.

In this way, most companies consider hiring foreigners a risk.  High-tech firms that need knowledge workers have no choice, but construction firms that depend on unskilled workers will generally only hire Dutch people for all but the worst jobs.

Unofficially, there are businesses allowed to be run by native and non native Dutch people here.  Fast food places tend to be run by foreigners, but more up-scale businesses like art galleries or trendy shops are almost exclusively native Dutch run, simply because many native Dutch will refuse to shop there otherwise.

Government agencies tend to work the same way.  Hiring foreigners for government jobs is a risk.  Dutch voters are in the majority, and they don’t want to upset them.  Cities like Amsterdam, until very recently, were almost exclusively staffed with male native Dutch workers.  A government study commissioned a few years ago, showed a huge discrepancy in salaries and promotions between native Dutch and non-native Dutch in city workers.  You have a situation where native Dutch decide who to hire and promote, and it’s simply a risk in that situation to do anything but favor native Dutch.

Except for the woman who serves coffee, as far as I’m aware, Duyts is staffed and owned exclusively by native Dutch men.  I was at their office once, and spoke with several of them on the phone.  Without any exception, all of the contractors I discussed my foundation repair with and asked for a quote were native Dutch men.

If you’re doing any sort of expensive work, or indeed spending any significant amount of money on something where you think cartels are involved, choosing someone who is not native Dutch, or a company that works with both native and non native Dutch, is a very good way of avoiding cartels!  This is also a way of supporting the part of the Netherlands that’s disadvantaged in terms of employment and business opportunities.  The problem is always finding a company run by a non-native Dutch person, because these tend not to be able to become established and may lack necessary skills and relationships with other companies.

It’s also just a part of the way these native Dutch dominated cartels work, is they are often disproportionate in their efforts to rip-off non Dutch.  This certainly seems to be the case with Duyts!  This is also a good reason for writing this in English, because foreigners need to especially be aware of this kind of problem here.

The Way Duyts Works

When I started this I had no idea why I needed an engineering firm like Duyts, or what they would actually do.  I don’t think anyone really understands this when they get started on a project like this.  What I could see was compared to the total cost of my foundation repair, the quote I received from Duyts was relatively small.  I knew they had to do some design work for the foundation, but that was all.  I was also expecting them to do 3 distinct things; basic foundation design, support structure to be used during the work to support my house, and a ‘stability portal’ (if the city decided I need one).  I think hardly anyone getting started on a repair like this understands what’s going on, and Duyts is very good at using this misunderstanding to their advantage!

After I signed the original quote and gave the drawings of my house they needed to use as a basis for the foundation repair, they gave me back a draft foundation design.  They also requested a quote for something called a sondering from a company called Fugro, which Fugro sent me.  The sondering is a ground stability analysis, used to determine the depth and diameter of the piles used, and is necessary in the general design of the foundation.  This was a bit of a rip-off already, because the quote from Fugro was unnecessarily high, but I felt I needed to accept it because they were the company Duyts choose.  In fact a sondering can come from any company you want, and if you are in this same situation you should ask for more quotes from other companies.

The draft foundation design had the notation on it that it was just a draft, and would probably change depending on the results of the sondering.  I was advised to arrange for the sondering to be done, and also told I could use the draft foundation design to ask for quotes from contractors.  I got started on all these things including asking a number of contractors for quotes.

The Sondering

I contacted Fugro for an appointment for the sondering, and a guy came to my house to do it.  When he got there, he had this long list of reasons why it couldn’t be done.  They were mostly very extreme statements like:

You know your piles need to be about 21 meters deep, and I need to send a probe into the ground to check that!  That’s very deep!  This isn’t easy to do!  The equipment I need to use is very heavy!  I need to attach it to something very solid, like your floor, but I’m not sure that’s heavy enough! I’m not sure your house is solid enough!  It might not be possible, or it might all go wrong!  I don’t want to damage your house!

I have to put a hole in your floor you know!  It might go wrong and I might break your floor!  How is it going to be to live in your house with a hole in the floor?  Maybe you should wait and do it closer to the time of the foundation repair.

Then lots of reasons why it might not be necessary:

You know, other sonderings have also been done in the neighborhood.  If they are close enough, maybe you can use one of those and don’t have to do it yourself.  You neighbor is also repairing his foundation, maybe you can get together with him and only do one.  It might not be necessary, who don’t you check with Duyts and see if they really need one.

In the end, he didn’t do the sondering, and it wasn’t clear if it was necessary.  I followed it up with Duyts who explained they weren’t completely sure if it was necessary, and yes the equipment needed to to it was heavy.  Yes, they had the results of a sondering one of my neighbors did, because this is a matter of public record, and my sondering probably wouldn’t be much different.  They said after the foundation work had started it wouldn’t be any problem to do the sondering and I could easily wait until then, if I would only sign this piece of paper promising to pay all the costs of changing the drawings and calculations if necessary…

This went on for months and months.  My position was there were two possibilities, either the sondering was necessary or it wasn’t.  If it was necessary, then it must be done, and in this case there was no reason to pay the extra costs of redoing the drawing and calculations and it should be done as soon as possible.  If it wasn’t necessary, then it wasn’t necessary.  If it wasn’t possible, then it wasn’t possible.  No one would give me a straight answer if it was necessary or possible.

What I found out much later was it’s no problem to do a sondering.  It takes a couple of hours.  The machine is very lightweight, and can be carried easily by one person.  It has telescoping poles that go between the ceiling and floor.  Yes, the probe has to go down 21 meters deep, but it is only a few millimeters in diameter, so it’s no problem.  Yes a hole has to be made in my floor, but it’s only a few centimeters in diameter, and can be easily covered or patched when they are done.

It’s also a requirement of the city that every foundation repair needs it’s own sondering, and while special arrangements might have been possible to do a sondering together with my neighbor who was also do his foundation at the same time, my neighbor didn’t agree to this.

Basically Duyts was lying, and all this nonsense that went on for months was just Duyts trying to get me to sign an agreement to pay for additional costs, without limitation.  So much for choosing the lowest original quote!  Fortunately I didn’t sign this.

Finalizing the Drawings

Finally the sondering was discussed over and over again, I refused to accept the extra costs of changing the drawings and was determined to see the results of the original quote I had signed before I paid for any extra work.

I asked Duyts to submit a ‘final drawing’ to the city for approval, together with the support construction needed during the work and the ‘stability portal’ the city said I needed.  Duyts made clear the sondering must be done eventually, so I asked they wait until the sondering was done before finalizing the drawings, and I would get on the phone with Fugro and make a hundred appointments with them if it was necessary, to finally get them to do the sondering.

I had also at this point received a number of quotes from contractors, been through months of negotiations with them, and told all but one of them I was sorry but I wasn’t interested in them.  The one I had selected to do the work, I told them in principle they were chosen, but since the drawings might change in the next few days, I wanted a final quote first based on the latest drawings.

By the way, what I discovered later is there is an agreement between contractors that do this kind of work to make quotes based on the number of square meters.  In the way they can all makes quotes that are about the same, and don’t really need to compete against one another.

Duyts didn’t wait for the sondering, and submitted the drawings to the city anyway for approval.  They were submitted with the notation Pending, with an explanation the sondering hadn’t been done yet and the design might change.  The drawing were totally changed, from 19 piles down to 10 and a number of other major structural changes.  I also had a number of outright complaints with these drawings, as they had apparently made some mistakes and done a number of things without my approval.

This left me in an enormously bad situation with the contractors I had asked for quotes from.  All the quotes I received were obsolete at this point, and I had told most of them I wasn’t going to do business with them anymore.  Once you tell a contractor no, it’s pretty hard to go back to them and say you’ve reconsidered and would they make another quote for you of a totally different design.

I then got a letter from the city saying my drawings were approved.  Based on this approval, Duyts demanded payment.

What ensued after this was months more spent on getting new quotes from new contractors, discussions with Duyts on fixing the drawings, writing letters, finally arranging the sondering.

What I Uncovered Later

Like I mentioned before, I finally walked away from Duyts.  We were simply at a stalemate where I had refused to pay them and they refused to continue with the work.  I had to start all over with a different engineering firm, who explained some very important things about the drawings from Duyts.

First of all, the approval from the city was based solely on the fact the drawings had the notation ‘Pending’.  With this notation, the city of Amsterdam will approve anything.  In fact the drawings were obviously wrong and could never be used to build a foundation!

The reason Duyts changed the drawings from the draft version was intentionally to put me in the bad situation I had asking contractors for quotes.   Duyts works with contractors to create ‘unexpected’ problems, so the contractors make money by demanding extra payment for these changes, and Duyts makes money by redoing the drawings.  The different companies just bounce their work back and forth, finding more problems and demanding more payments.  In fact, for Dutys to redo the drawings is not a lot of work, because they are already in the computer, but Duyts asks almost the full or maybe half the price of making new drawings, over and over again.

The foundation design drawing I had was visibly wrong.  Most importantly, Duyts left out a row of piles.  This would have been very visible to any contractor who had looked at the drawings and given me a quote, because there is a maximum distance possible between piles, and this missing row left some piles too far apart.  All experienced contractors would have seen this, and not a single one I asked for a quote said anything about this!

Duyts also made drawings of the support structure to be used during the work to support my house, and the ‘stability portal’ the city said I needed.

The support structure was also impossible.  It had heavy horizontal steel bars, 150 cm off the floor (about chest height), 50cm apart.  It simply would not have been possible for workers to work in the house with such a structure in place, the ergonomics of carrying heavy machinery would have been impossible.  It also would have been unnecessarily expensive.

The stability portal was also unworkable.  It was placed in the front of my house, installed from the outside.  It would have been visible from the street on the front of my 350 year old house, and required major redoing of the old brick work on the front.  Duyts picked what was probably the worst possible place, in the expectation it would need to be redone later.

However much money I lost from being sued by Duyts, I saved it by not having to pay for the drawings to be redone over and over.

Food labelling has always been a contentious issue here in the Netherlands.  To be quite honest I’m not current on all the arguments or discussions, but I do know new labels have appeared on our food here in the last several months.  In the past I’ve heard things off and on about how food manufactures didn’t want a ‘stop light’ system of labelling, because they didn’t want any food clearly labelled as ‘unhealthy’.  Supposedly food manufacturers were to be absolutely forbidden from making even indirect health claims about their products.  Apparently as well as in the Netherlands there have been disputes between different countries as well.

I also don’t see labelling on all foods, so I’m not sure where it’s mandatory or not.  Anyone reading this in other European countries see the same labelling where you are?  Does anyone know if we have a standard system yet or not?

As far as I can tell when I look at our new food labels is the food manufactures must have totally won the fight.

The reality of course is these labels are not so much about providing consumer information as they are to teach us to eat more processed foods.  Food companies in North America have for decades been making huge profits by teaching people about the different ingredients in food; salt, fat, sugar, oils, protein, etc.  By teaching us some are better and some are unhealthy, they make consumers go crazy buying foods without some things, and with extra other things added.  Even if there are no explicit health claims on the packages, there are public information campaigns teaching us what and what not to eat.

I’m starting to see that more and more in mass media here, for example on the BBC.  I have ad blocking software on my browser, so display ads don’t appear, but increasingly the BBC is running ‘infomercials’, about some new study somewhere that says we should eat more or less of some ingredient that’s commonly found in processed foods, or about how we are supposed to drink more or less alcohol.

On the subject of alcohol consumption there was some controversy recently because the government apparently was citing a study which gave safe alcohol on a weekly basis, but taking the numbers, dividing them by 7, and calling them a safe daily consumption.  This was obviously flawed math on the part of the government.

They are very much trying to start the same advertising campaigns and processed food promotions here that led to the obesity problems of North America.

For the record Steph and I are vegetarian, emphasize fresh and local foods over processed ones, buy most of our food from neighborhood organic markets and cook nearly all of our own meals.  In particular, we make it a point of sitting down and eating at least one meal together every day.

When you eat meals like this it’s very easy to make a mockery of nearly all dietary advice.  For example, the latest advice making the rounds here is no one should eat more than 6g or about 1 tsp of salt every day.  There’s no way Steph and I come anywhere near that on any kind of regular basis.  Even adding up all the salt we put on our food at the table, the salt in our bread and cheese and the salt we cook with.  We occasionally buy other processed foods besides bread and cheese, and even taking into account what these contain, we are still no where close.  It’s possible on the odd day we go over a little bit, but I do not consider this any risk to our health.

There is simply no reason for Steph and I to count the salt in all of our foods, or cut down or anything else, unless we want to give ourselves an eating disorder.  While there may be some reason to believe eating too much salt is unhealthy, although I can’t confirm this, there is no credible evidence to suggest if you are not eating too much salt that eating less is any healthier for you.  In particular there’s no evidence the low salt crazes America has gone through over the years have improved anyone’s health.

There’s a similar argument to be made for calories, protein, fat, oils and everything else that’s supposed to be either good or bad for you.  If you eat a varied diet, that doesn’t have too much meat or processed foods, the chances are you meet every credible nutritional guideline ever published without trying.

What are we talking about here?

The picture above is from a bag of ribbled potato chips (crisps).  It’s a 200g bag, or a little less than a half pound, in my opinion what a typical consumer would eat over a day or two.  A teenager could probably polish it off in an hour.  In any case, it’s packaged in the size consumers buy and will mostly be eaten by 1 or 2 people within a short period of time, so it’s not really sensible to talk about the food value of anything but the entire bag and any talk of ‘servings’ is pretty much nonsense.

There are many people who would like to get into an argument over how unhealthy it is to eat a bag of chips like this.  It’s an unbelievably emotional subject for many people.  I mean, just look at it — it’s a bag of potato chips!  Right?  What junk!  Calories!  Fat!  Who can justify eating something like that?  People on government benefits shouldn’t be allowed to buy food like this — right?  To all people like this, all I can say is get over it.

It’s too bad it isn’t easier to buy a higher quality product at a comparable price, in particular potato farmers use a lot of chemicals and potatoes themselves contain a lot of residues.  This and the fact they are made in bulk without any sort of quality standards.  Otherwise the ingredients from the label above are:  Potatoes, Sunflower Oil and Salt.  It’s still a processed food, and there are always problems with processed foods, but it’s a lot better than many alternatives.  For many centuries before WWII and the Irish Potato Famine, many people lived primarily on these sorts of food ingredients.  While I wouldn’t suggest anyone should live only on potato chips, you could do a lot worse.

One of the issues with standard potato chips like these is they are one of the cheapest food alternatives, and the food manufactures want you to buy more expensive foods, and want everyone to think there is something somehow wrong with a food that’s so cheap.

What’s on the Label?

I’m not going to translate every word on the label, but going to Google then selecting Language Tools you can find a translator.

On the bottom is what everyone is suppose to pay the most attention to, from left to right:

Calories:  139  –  7%

Sugars:  0.1g — <1%

Fat: 8.8g — 13%

Saturated Fat:  0.8g — 4%

Sodium: 0.138g — 6%

These are all for a 25g serving, and since the bag is 200g, you have to multiply all these numbers by 8.  For your convenience:

Calories: 1112 — 56%

Sugars: 0.8g

Fat: 70.4g — 104%

Saturated Fat: 6.4g — 32%

Sodium: 1.104g — 48%

The percentage figures are GDA or ‘Guideline Daily Amount’.  Whatever this means.  Maximum or minimum?  The package doesn’t say.

So what have we learned here?  Is it that when we eat an entire bag of potato chips every day, this alone will put our fat intake 4% over the limit?  What happens if we eat two bags a week, can we average out these numbers?  Of course we are all focused on that 104% figure, just what exactly are the health consequences of going 4% over the limit?

The fact of the matter is there is no useful information here.  It’s not possible to draw any conclusions about how healthy this product is for you, except emotional conclusions.

These figures are solely so consumers have a way of choosing processed foods they eat, and so they think some are healthier than others, without the manufactures making any explicit health claims.