Friday 20 July 2012
The lads came back on Thursday and took all the shuttering down. That left us with the site ready for the next stage - or not. There was concrete rubble everywhere, including big slabs on the ground where the machine had splurted. There was wood still nailed down where they couldn't prise it off. Wood in splinters, wood with nails sticking up everywhere underfoot. Pieces of bent rebar. Rebar embedded in the ground where they couldn't remove it, bent and and rusty nails, rebar off-cuts. All very scruffy, and dangerous underfoot.
And in one corner, an error. I had spotted this when it was shuttered, and mentioned it to Constantine, but then forgot about the crucial bit and just got it part fixed. Not clever. The photo below (in which my poor camera shows how it is suffering from all the work it has to do and has stopped opening its shutters properly) illustrates how the extended footing for the cob wall has been mislaid through the utility room space. The footing in the foreground needs to be as wide as the footing in the distance. Also, because the cob wall has been forgotten, the utility room is far too narrow. I didn't spec this bit, I was just going to put a lean-to on afterwards, but Constantine and the concrete man wanted it to have proper foundations. Unfortunately, this is at the highest point of the gable wall, where we have nearly 5 metres of cob. We are going to have to drill holes, glue in rebar, attach steel and pour more concrete to extend the footing about 20 cm. Meanwhile, I decided that if I've got this space, I might as well use it as a root cellar, and put a concrete skim in the base and a wood floor with trap door access on top. (Eventually).
The lads came back on Thursday and took all the shuttering down. That left us with the site ready for the next stage - or not. There was concrete rubble everywhere, including big slabs on the ground where the machine had splurted. There was wood still nailed down where they couldn't prise it off. Wood in splinters, wood with nails sticking up everywhere underfoot. Pieces of bent rebar. Rebar embedded in the ground where they couldn't remove it, bent and and rusty nails, rebar off-cuts. All very scruffy, and dangerous underfoot.
And in one corner, an error. I had spotted this when it was shuttered, and mentioned it to Constantine, but then forgot about the crucial bit and just got it part fixed. Not clever. The photo below (in which my poor camera shows how it is suffering from all the work it has to do and has stopped opening its shutters properly) illustrates how the extended footing for the cob wall has been mislaid through the utility room space. The footing in the foreground needs to be as wide as the footing in the distance. Also, because the cob wall has been forgotten, the utility room is far too narrow. I didn't spec this bit, I was just going to put a lean-to on afterwards, but Constantine and the concrete man wanted it to have proper foundations. Unfortunately, this is at the highest point of the gable wall, where we have nearly 5 metres of cob. We are going to have to drill holes, glue in rebar, attach steel and pour more concrete to extend the footing about 20 cm. Meanwhile, I decided that if I've got this space, I might as well use it as a root cellar, and put a concrete skim in the base and a wood floor with trap door access on top. (Eventually).
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