The house wot Juffy built
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”
Just for something different….let’s build a retaining wall! On to the last one, thankfully – across the front of the shed, which will define the slope for the original driveway to come down and meet the level of the carport, and down the back of the shed to stop the neighbour’s carport from ending up in mine. Seems important. The main complication with this wall is the constantly changing levels – both sides start at the height of the concrete kerbing under the hibiscus hedge,…Continue Reading “Shed retaining wall”
Poured the concrete for the house retaining wall on Wednesday – went reasonably smoothly, except for the operator not really getting the concept of “a bit more concrete slowly, please” and throwing concrete around with complete abandon. So we ended up with some largish blobs of concrete not inside the form. Spent today removing the formwork. I’d expected this to be a bit easier than it was, but the plywood was tightly wedged between the concrete and the sides of the trench in a lot…Continue Reading “House retaining wall – pour and un-forming”