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Back on my own today, putting together the C-channels for the inside edges of the upstand. Figured this would be a long day, but it turned into the first late-night epic. Spent the morning welding together the last 2 sections, which were about 7 and 9m long respectively and included my architect’s piece of “flair” – the recessed wall on the pantry which steps in about 200mm for *reasons*. Why did I agree to this? There’s a shot of the formwork and C-channel here from…Continue Reading “Concrete prep, day 3” →

Spent yesterday doing boring stuff – clearing extra sand out of the trenches (we’ve had a fair bit of rain which ruined my nice clean lines) and experimenting with my sweet new welding skills: Early start today, with a vast array of men arriving shortly afterwards – the concreter, his 3 helpers and two steel guys. 8 hours of chaos, discussions, a couple of conversations with the engineer later, we’d turned this: into this: I did my usual a-bit-of-everything – started off cutting some more…Continue Reading “Concrete prep: day 2” →

A large pile of rebar appeared! (The big white bag is full of 12mm bars bent into squares, to go into the edge thickening and upstand)

Been a bit quiet in terms of visible progress, but there’s been lots of conversations going on with plumbers (who have mainly stopped freaking out about the whole strawbale thing), sparkies (who are definitely still freaking out about the strawbale thing) and waiting to talk to the concrete guy, Maurice, who is fiendishly busy and trying to fit all his jobs in between rain showers. Finally nailed him down during the week and we talked non-stop for about 90 minutes – the result of which…Continue Reading “Prepping for concrete” →

All of the edge trenches, and the internal trenches under the bedrooms etc, done. One more day should see the house trenches complete and ready for the plumber to do their pre-lay on Monday.

Short digging session this afternoon, finished the south wall of the main room – kitchen, front door and one wall of the living room. Starting to look very house-shaped. I’m leaving the survey pegs in place as long as possible as a backup in case one of my hurdles gets knocked, hence the weird little bulges in the outside edge of the trench. I’m a bit surprised I haven’t managed to kick one of the pegs yet – this one at one side of the…Continue Reading “More house-shaped holes” →

Armed with a shovel and my many, many string lines, I started attacking the trenches for the foundations. Quickly worked out that shaping the trench by hand was going to be a bad time, and made myself a profile out of ply. This made it a lot easier, even if it still wasn’t “fun” per se – was still a long day of throwing sand around, but I got half of the perimeter trench done. This picture wasn’t really indicative of the weather, either –…Continue Reading “House-shaped holes!” →

Quiet couple of weeks, with the earthworks guys finishing the shed sand pad and then I hit a bit of a block – waiting for concrete people to be intelligent at me, and we also had “the storm of the decade” come through and make the entire city rather soggy for the better part of the last week. Thankfully the sand pads have survived the rain unscathed. The rain cleared today, and since concrete people were still being slow at me I decided to start…Continue Reading “All the string lines” →

Took down the formwork for the wall on Thursday, and did most of the bottom row of panels. Put (most of) the rest of the panels in today, and did some work fixing the panels in place – one manufacturer suggested putting mortar in the channel of each post behind the panel to lock the panel in place, so I did some of that too. Pretty happy with the final result – I’m liking the angled panels at each change of height. The missing panels…Continue Reading “Shed retaining wall complete!” →

Final concrete pour(!) for the retaining walls this morning went really well. I spent a lot more time putting up the formwork, reinforcing and bracing it, than I had before – ended up with the first sheets stitched together, propped up on little ‘legs’ to the right height, and lined with builders’ plastic, then put in a second layer behind those sheets and screwed to the first for extra strength. The whole thing then got propped up in the trench with handy blocks of concrete…Continue Reading “Final retaining wall pour” →