This felt like the first bit of construction that I couldn’t undo – of course this is a bit silly, what with 6 tonnes of ATU already in the ground, but for that I just sat around and watched people install it – this was stuff I’d put together myself which makes a difference…somehow.
Dad and I spent the morning tweaking the propping and fixing the alignment of the posts – a few of them shifted when I put the long strips of rebar on either side of the posts (forgot to get a photo of this part). Lots of bar chairs and wire holding it all in place, anwyay.
Concrete truck eventually rocked up with 6 cubic metres of slop on board – I had no idea how this was going to go, having never done a large concrete pour before, and had fears of the driver rocking up, parking his truck somewhere inconvenient and making us ferry the concrete over in barrows or something. In fact he was great – repositioned the truck constantly to make it easier to pour directly into the trench, and was patient with us poking concrete around and tweaking the posts as we went. The concrete had enough aggregate in it to hold the posts up as we went, so the props got progressively chucked aside.
After the truck left, we had to do a run down the wall tweaking the level of the concrete between each post to make sure the panels would fit properly. Nearly lost the race against the concrete hardening in the heat – could have done with 2 more people doing this we went, but we got there.
